In recent years, container platforms – also referred to as container orchestration systems – have grown in popularity and transformed the processes of software development, testing, and deployment.
Managed container solutions are being quickly adopted by tech firms and startups, allowing them to focus more on road map priorities that generate business outcomes such as growth, competitive advantage, and enhanced profitability while spending less engineering resources on infrastructure maintenance.
One of the leading solutions for containerized application management is the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). If you are an Azure cloud and Kubernetes user, you will find this information much more interesting because it is important to gain knowledge in this field if we are exploring the world of container platforms.
However, when it comes to monitoring the AKS, we may feel pressured. . Microsoft has its own native monitoring tools, but they are insufficient to address complicated AKS security, cost, and performance management requirements.
There are multiple tools available in the market that can be used to monitor the AKS cloud, and by adopting the right strategy and approach, it will be easy to tackle the challenges. As we move forward, we will explore more on AKS Monitoring.
What is AKS?
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service offered by Microsoft Azure, and the open-source Kubernetes system serves as the foundation for AKS. Installing and maintaining Kubernetes can be challenging, despite its benefits for managing containerized workloads and services. Organizations can manage crucial functions such as deploying, horizontal scaling, and managing Docker containers and container-based applications, and AKS helps simplify the process.
Why choose AKS over Kubernetes?
Managed Service: Since AKS is a managed service offered by Azure, the underlying infrastructure, including the Kubernetes control plane, is managed by Azure. With AKS, we can concentrate on managing and deploying the applications instead of being concerned about Kubernetes’ operational details. However, Kubernetes necessitates manual control plane setup and maintenance, which involves setting up, protecting, and maintaining the cluster architecture.
Integration with Azure Services: Other Azure services including Azure Active Directory (Entra ID), Azure Container Registry, Azure Monitor, Azure Networking, and Azure Storage are also closely linked with AKS. Within the Azure Kubernetes environment, this integration streamlines networking, storage, monitoring, authentication, and container image management. Since Kubernetes is independent of any one cloud provider, it necessitates extra setup and cloud service integration.
Upgrades, Maintenance, and Support: AKS ensures you are using the most recent stable Kubernetes version by managing the control plane upgrades and maintenance. This simplifies the process of maintaining and upgrading Kubernetes clusters. However, you are responsible for handling cluster maintenance using Kubernetes, which includes patching, security feature updates, and version upgrades. Microsoft Azure-backed enterprise-grade support and service level agreements (SLAs) are provided by AKS. In the event of problems or outages, this offers reassurance and assistance.
What is AKS monitoring?
The process of gathering and analyzing information regarding the efficiency, affordability, and cybersecurity of AKS environments is known as AKS monitoring.
One can spot problems such as overprovisioned Azure resources, network connectivity problems, and container failures by keeping an eye on AKS. When properly implemented, AKS monitoring enables the identification of potential issues early on and taking proactive measures to address them before they become significant failures.
How can we monitor AKS?
Azure Monitor can be used to keep an eye on AKS. After the AKS cluster is formed, container monitoring can be activated through the Azure portal. The specific goal of Azure Kubernetes cluster monitoring is to proactively monitor the resources that each cluster’s applications utilize. These resources consist of storage, memory, and CPU usage. Keeping an eye on the Kubernetes cluster guarantees that the pod processes are current and that pod containers are not crashing and restarting frequently. Additionally, it ensures that there are enough nodes to support the pod processes.
We will discuss several aspects of Azure’s built-in monitoring tool, Azure Monitor.
What are the key features of Azure Monitor?
Container Logs Monitoring: Azure Monitor Logs gathers information from the resources and components of Kubernetes. The logs tab allows us to see and examine these logs, which are produced by the nodes, pods, containerized applications, and Kubernetes control plane. With the use of this page’s advanced query analyzer, users can examine millions of records in a flash. You can visualize your logs, create alert rules, analyze your logs, and more with this functionality.
Metrics Monitoring: This includes both application performance monitoring (APM) and Kubernetes monitoring. Application monitoring consists of the availability of the application, status of the resources such as CPU, memory, network, storage, and the application’s health, speed, and performance.
AKS cluster: Azure’s built-in monitoring tool, Azure Monitor, can monitor the health and performance of the Kubernetes cluster. It provides features rich and variant features to effectively monitor the cluster.
Kubernetes Pod Monitoring: Pods are the minor deployable units of computing that can be created and managed in Kubernetes. A pod is a group of one or more containers with shared storage and network resources and a specification for how to run the containers. A pod’s contents are always co-located, co-scheduled, and run in a shared context.
Application deployment status, node health and performance, resource allocation to all pods, node and pod resource utilization, pod availability, control plane, and node access to the Kubernetes cluster are all examples of Kubernetes-specific monitoring. Even though we have some specific advantages on Azure monitor, there are some limitations too.
- Inability to monitor resources at the app level
- Limited conditions for alerts
- Limited types of notification channels
- Inability to monitor serverless applications
Therefore, let us ‘Observe’ AKS with Digitate’s ignio Observe to feel the change.
How does ignio™ Observe help ?
ignio Observe can provide deeper visibility and control on AKS. Also, when it comes to the types of Azure monitor metrics and logs you collect, Observe provides various options and solutions to the users.
The other exciting feature is that Observe is integrated with ignio Event Management , selfheal and automation can be initiated within a few seconds.
It is also possible to notify the relevant individuals through mail or any other API calls. This way, they can take immediate action if required.
Observe visual triaging will provide many more options with the dashboards. Observe provides OOB dashboards for real-time AKS monitoring where we can specifically pinpoint any issues related to AKS.
For more information on ignio Observe and its features, contact us here for a detailed demo.
