Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Kubernetes 1.19 release candidate is now available for download and experimentation ahead of general availability later this month. You can try it now with MicroK8s. To get the latest Kubernetes on your machine, install MicroK8s and get a lightweight, zero-ops K8s cluster in no time: Or install from https://snapcraft.io/microk8s and select 1.19/candidate You can install MicroK8s on Ubuntu and all major Linux distributions or on Windows and macOS using native installers.

Logs, metrics and traces are the three pillars of the Observability world. The distributed tracing world, in particular, has seen a lot of innovation in recent months, with OpenTelemetry standardization and with Jaeger open source project graduating from the CNCF incubation. According to the recent DevOps Pulse report, Jaeger is used by over 30% of those practicing distributed tracing.

Kubernetes has a lot of features and deployment options for running containers. One of these is the DaemonSet. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what a DaemonSet is, what it can be used for, and how to create and update them.

Elastic Container Service (ECS) is the fully managed container orchestration service by Amazon. Combined with Fargate, Amazon’s serverless compute engine for containers, you can run your container workload without the need to provision your own compute resources. But how can you consolidate and query all of your logs and metadata for these workloads? Enter Loki, the log aggregation system from Grafana Labs that has proven to increase performance and decrease costs.

Learning how to monitor etcd is of vital importance when running Kubernetes in production. Monitoring etcd will let you validate that the service performs as expected, while detecting and troubleshooting issues that could take your entire infrastructure down. Keep reading to learn how you can collect the most important metrics from etcd and use them to monitor this service. etcd is a foundational component of the Kubernetes control plane.

Microsegmentation is a security technique that is used to isolate workloads from one another. Microsegmentation limits the blast radius of a data breach by making network security more granular. Should a breach occur, the damage is confined to the affected segment. Application workloads have evolved over time – starting from bare metal, to a mix of on-prem and cloud virtual machines and containers.

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.