Observability

Cloud Orbiter offers comprehensive observability for your Kubernetes cluster. Observability is crucial for managing your cluster's health, reliability, and security. Observing your Kubernetes cluster is similar to having a team of experts working around the clock to ensure your cluster's optimal performance.

With observability, you can quickly identify and resolve issues, predict usage patterns and plan for growth, and protect your cluster from potential threats. Observability is achieved through a set of best practices, including monitoring and alerting, centralized logging, metrics collection, tracing, visualizations, and security auditing. These practices enable you to collect and analyze data about your cluster's resources, performance, and security.

What does Cloud Orbiter offer for achieving observability?

Cloud Orbiter uses Prometheus to achieve observability in your Kubernetes cluster. Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system well-suited for monitoring and alerting in Kubernetes environments. It is designed to collect time-series data from various sources, including Kubernetes metrics APIs, and provide powerful querying and alerting capabilities.

Without enabling the Prometheus add-on, some of the key monitoring features in Cloud Orbiter will be unavailable. Specifically, you will not be able to see time-based charts that show you real-time monitoring results. However, you will still be able to view some basic information about your cluster's resource usage, including CPU and RAM usage by namespace, as well as network input-output pressure.

This means that you may miss important information about the health and performance of your cluster and be less able to troubleshoot issues as they arise. To fully leverage the monitoring capabilities of your Kubernetes cluster, we strongly recommend enabling the Prometheus add-on.

Here are some metrics examples that you can track with observability for your Kubernetes cluster:

Node ready vs total nodes

This metric displays the number of nodes in your cluster that are currently ready and the total number of nodes in the cluster. By monitoring this metric, you can ensure that all nodes are operational and ready to serve requests.

Node RAM usage vs capacity

This metric shows the percentage of RAM used by the nodes in your cluster and how much RAM capacity is available. By monitoring this metric, you can ensure that your applications have enough resources and detect any potential issues related to memory usage.

Node CPU usage vs capacity

This metric displays the percentage of CPU used by the nodes in your cluster and how much CPU capacity is available. It helps you determine if you need to add more nodes to your cluster or adjust resource allocations for your applications.

Pod usage vs capacity

This metric shows the number of pods running in your Kubernetes cluster and how many pods your cluster can support. This can help you identify if you are reaching the maximum capacity of your cluster or if there are enough resources to scale up your application.

CPU use by namespace

This metric shows the amount of CPU used by each namespace in your cluster. By monitoring this metric, you can ensure that each namespace has enough resources and detect any potential issues related to CPU usage.

RAM use by namespace

This metric displays the amount of RAM used by each namespace in your cluster. This can help you identify which namespaces are consuming the most resources and optimize your resource allocation accordingly.

Network I/O pressure

This metric measures the network input-output (I/O) pressure on your cluster. By monitoring network I/O pressure, you can detect any potential network bottlenecks and optimize your cluster's network performance.

How can you enable the Prometheus add-on?

To enable the Prometheus add-on for your Kubernetes cluster in Cloud Orbiter, follow these simple steps:

  1. Log in to your Cloud Orbiter portal.
  2. Navigate to the specific cluster for which you want to enable the Prometheus add-on.
  3. If the add-on is not already enabled, you will see a message stating Prometheus add-on not installed. Please install the add-on to use this feature. Below this message, you will find a Go to Add-on button. Click on this button.
  4. You will be directed to the Add-ons page, where you can see the Prometheus add-on listed.
  5. Click on the three dots located at the right side of the Prometheus add-on to expand the options menu.
  6. Click on the Enable button to enable the add-on for your cluster.

Once enabled, you will be able to use the powerful monitoring and alerting capabilities of Prometheus to achieve comprehensive observability for your Kubernetes cluster.

Note: If you encounter any issues or require further assistance, please contact the support team.