Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes is THE buzzword these days. Almost every IT organization is currently using it or is in the process of implementing it as part of their infrastructure. The transition to Kubernetes is complicated, whether a company is using an on-premises, cloud, hybrid, or managed solution, and it usually involves other changes in the codebase, such as shifting to a microservices architecture. While the implementation phase is led by the DevOps team, it requires the participation of the whole R&D group.

Logs provide invaluable information about issues you need to troubleshoot. In some circumstances, that may mean that you have to look back at old logs. For example, you may be running a security audit and need to analyze months-old HTTP request logs for a list of specific IP addresses over a period of time. Or you might need to investigate why a scheduled service never occurred, or run an exhaustive postmortem on incidents that happened over a couple months but that you suspect are related.

CloudTrail logs track actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service, whether taken through the AWS console or API operations. In contrast to on-premise-infrastructure where something as important as network flow monitoring (Netflow logs) could take weeks or months to get off the ground, AWS has the ability to track flow logs with a few clicks at relatively low cost.

Kubernetes has several key differences that push the limits of traditional application monitoring. Due to the distributed ephemeral nature of Kubernetes, most existing solutions fail to give the visibility we might expect, resulting in longer resolution times. Looking at these potential pitfalls can help guide us as we take a fresh look at Kubernetes management and monitoring.

When you need to troubleshoot an issue in your Node.js application, logs provide information about the severity of the problem, as well as insights into its root cause. You can use logs to capture stack traces and other types of activity, and trace them back to specific session IDs, user IDs, request endpoints—anything that will help you efficiently monitor your application.

Complex problems can often be solved with simple, practical solutions. That’s what our team at Kenshoo discovered when we realized that we needed a way to easily and proactively track specific log messages which indicate mission-critical events.