Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Sometimes, two concepts overlap so much that it’s hard to view them in isolation. Today, incident management and problem management fit this description to a tee. This wasn’t always the case. For a long time, these two ITIL concepts were seen as distinct—with specialized roles overseeing each. Incident management existed in one corner and problem management in the other. Then came the DevOps movement and the lines suddenly became blurred. So where do they stand today?

In this article, we will be covering how to monitor Kubernetes using Graphite, and we’ll do the visualization with Grafana. The focus will be on monitoring and plotting essential metrics for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. We will download, implement and monitor custom dashboards for Kubernetes that can be downloaded from the Grafana dashboard resources. These dashboards have variables to allow drilling down into the data at a granular level.

Prometheus is becoming a popular tool for monitoring Python applications despite the fact that it was originally designed for single-process multi-threaded applications, rather than multi-process. Prometheus was developed in the Soundcloud environment and was inspired by Google’s Borgmon. In its original environment, Borgmon relies on straightforward methods of service discovery - where Borg can easily find all jobs running on a cluster.

Before we jump into the specifics of Grafana and Datadog, let's look at the main comparison points. Grafana is a great dashboard that allows you to plug in essentially any data source in the world. Grafana is most commonly paired with Prometheus, Graphite, and Elasticsearch to provide a full APM, time-series, and logs monitoring stack.

Virtual machines give you a flexible and convenient environment where people can access different operating systems, networks, and storage while still using the same computer. This prevents them from purchasing extra machines, switching to other devices, and maintaining them. This helps companies to save costs and increase task efficiency. Although using VMs for everyday tasks may be enjoyable, ensuring consistent performance and performing maintenance can be daunting.

Microservices are increasingly used in the development world as developers work to create larger, more complex applications that are better developed and managed as a combination of smaller services that work cohesively together for more extensive, application-wide functionality. Tools such as Service Fabric are rising to meet the need to think about and build apps using a piece-by-piece methodology that is, frankly, less mind-boggling than considering the whole of the application at once.