In the emerging cloud-native environment, Kubernetes leads the domain and has become the standard for orchestrating containers. It’s the most popular open-source container orchestration platform due to its ability to support the diverse requirements and constraints an application can create. It is highly efficient and has revolutionized distributed orchestration. But, it too can be complex, messy, and challenging to manage. Managing multiple Kubernetes clusters presents a new set of challenges.
We know that as Kubernetes grows and evolves, it will likely have more optimized and enhanced features. However, there are tools available that can help you with many common problems with Kubernetes in production. We have listed down some of the best Kubernetes monitoring tools for you based on the usage of each of them.
Dashboard
Kubelet
These are “node agents” that run on each node of a cluster of Kubernetes, and they can register the node with the central API server. A “PodSpec,” a YAML or JSON object used to describe each pod. Kubelet is thereby able to monitor these nodes by their PodSpecs.
Furthermore, Kublet accepts PodSpecs from the API server. They are also able to do so from other sources. But are unable to manage them. Docker’s cAdvisor is one such source, and its main benefit is that it allows monitoring of the entire cluster.
Download Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubelet
Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes Dashboard is a web-based UI add-on for Kubernetes clusters. It provides a simple way to manage, troubleshoot and monitor your environment. You can use the Kubernetes Dashboard to see basic metrics related to memory and CPU usage statistics across all of your nodes and monitor the health of workloads (pods, deployments, replica sets, cron jobs, etc.)
You can easily install the Kubernetes Dashboard with ready-to-use YAML files.
Download link: https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard
Deployment
Kubespray
Kubespray provides a set of Ansible roles for Kubernetes deployment and configuration. Kubespray can use AWS, GCE, Azure, OpenStack, or a bare-metal Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.
Kubespray is an open-source project with an open development model. The tool is a good choice for people who already know Ansible, as there’s no need to use another tool for provisioning and orchestration. Kubespray uses kubeadm under the hood.
Download Link: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kubespray
Kubeadm
Kubeadm has been a Kubernetes distribution tool since version 1.4. The tool helps to bootstrap best-practice Kubernetes clusters on existing infrastructure. Kubeadm cannot provide infrastructure for you, though, and its main advantage is the ability to launch minimum viable Kubernetes clusters anywhere. Add-ons and networking setup are both out of Kubeadm’s scope, so you will need to install this manually or use another tool.
Download Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source solution used for monitoring, metrics, data visualization, and analysis.
Compared to other visualization tools, Grafana stands out because it connects with a long list of databases. When used to monitor Kubernetes, Grafana usually sits on top of Prometheus, but it’s also popular in combination with InfluxDB or Graphite. You can build comprehensive monitoring dashboards with various graphs, from heatmaps to line graphs, bar graphs, histograms, or Geo maps. And you can already find a lot of ready-to-use Kubernetes monitoring dashboards. Grafana also features a built-in alerting system, filtering capabilities, annotations, data-source-specific querying, authentication and authorization, cross-organizational collaboration, etc.
Grafana is easy to set up and use. It’s popular in the Kubernetes community, and some deployment configuration files include a Grafana container by default.
Download Link: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/?search=kubernetes
JAAS
JAAS is Juju as a Service, managed by Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu. It introduces a standard controller that operates all the machines in your running models.
JAAS enables you to build quickly, configure, manage and deploy your applications to the public cloud directly from your browser or the command line. It also allows you to share your models and easily collaborate with other users.
Download Link: https://jaas.ai/
Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it simple to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes. Amazon EKS works your Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple AWS Availability Zones while automatically detecting and replacing unhealthy control plane nodes and providing on-demand upgrades and patching. You provision worker nodes and connect them to the provided Amazon EKS endpoint.
Download Link: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
Monitoring
KubeBox
Kubebox is a terminal console for the Kubernetes cluster which allows you to manage and monitor your cluster-live status with a friendly, old-school interface. Kubebox shows your pod resource usage, cluster monitoring, container logs, etc. Additionally, you can easily navigate to the desired namespace and execute it into the desired container for fast troubleshooting/recovery.
Download Link: https://github.com/astefanutti/kubebox
Kubewatch
Kubewatch is a Kubernetes watcher which can publish K8s events to the team communication app, Slack. Kubewatch runs as a pod inside Kubernetes clusters and monitors changes in the system. You can specify the notifications you want to receive by editing the configuration file.
Download Link: https://github.com/bitnami-labs/kubewatch
Searchlight
Searchlight by AppsCode is a Kubernetes operator for Icinga. Searchlight periodically runs various checks on Kubernetes clusters and alerts you via email, SMS or chat if something goes wrong.
Searchlight includes a default suite of checks explicitly written for Kubernetes. Also, it can enhance Prometheus monitoring with external black-box monitoring and serves as a fallback in case internal systems fail.
Download Link: https://github.com/appscode/searchlight
Prometheus
Prometheus is one of the most popular open-source tools used to monitor Kubernetes. It was developed by SoundCloud and donated to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). What’s different about Prometheus compared to other time-series databases – such as Cassandra, Graphite, and InfluxDB – is its simple yet powerful multidimensional data model and its flexible query language (PromQL). Furthermore, it follows a pull model rather than a push and has built-in real-time alerting mechanisms. Finally, being open-source, it gathered a large community interested in helping and bringing innovation.
Prometheus has no built-in dashboard, so you’ll need to use a separate visualization tool. Users opt for Grafana.
Download link: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus
Security
Open Policy Agent (OPA)
32% of respondents secure Kubernetes with the Open Policy Agent (OPA). While OPA is a general-purpose policy engine, it is a powerful tool for enforcing context-aware security policies. With the deprecation of Pod Security Policy initiated as of Kubernetes v.1.21 (and complete removal by v.1.25), many organizations will likely turn to OPA to fill in that gap.
Download Link: https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa
Prisma Cloud (Previously known as Twistlock)
Prisma Cloud is a cloud native security platform that enables you to secure your cloud native infrastructure and cloud native applications using a single dashboard. It offers comprehensive visibility and threat detection across your organization’s hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure. Prisma Cloud provides layer three micro-segmentation and a layer seven firewall that can protect front-end microservices from common attacks.
Download Link: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/prisma/cloud
Falco
Falco is a behavioral activity monitor designed to detect anomalous activity in your applications. Falco is based on the Sysdig Project, an open-source tool (and now a commercial service) built for monitoring container performance by way of tracking kernel system calls. Falco lets you continuously monitor and detect container, application, host, and network activity with one set of rules.
Download Link: https://sysdig.com/opensource/falco/
Kubesec.io
Kubesec is an open-source Kubernetes security scanner and analysis tool. The way it works, it accepts a single Kubernetes manifests file and provides a severity score for each found vulnerability. You will have total control and additional suggestions for improving overall system security.
Kubesec analyzes your resource YAML file, returns the score(a higher score is better), and details its critical issue.
Download Link: https://kubesec.io
Conclusion
In this article, we have looked at four essential types of Kubernetes tools. There are so many more tools available in the market for free. However, choosing a device depends on your monitoring needs and use case.
Please choose any of the tools mentioned above and try it out on your Kubernetes cluster!
