Kubernetes Observability: 3 Key Challenges and Overcoming Them

What Is Kubernetes Observability? 

Kubernetes observability refers to the ability to gain insights into the performance and health of a Kubernetes cluster and its components. Observability is crucial for ensuring the reliability and availability of containerized applications running on Kubernetes. It allows DevOps teams to monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues in real-time, as well as identify potential problems before they occur.

Observability in Kubernetes can be broken down into three main areas:

• Metrics: Metrics provide quantitative data about the performance and behavior of the Kubernetes cluster and its components. Metrics can include CPU and memory usage, network traffic, and application-specific metrics.
• Logs: Logs are textual data that provide information about the events and activities that occur within the Kubernetes cluster and its components. Logs can be used to identify issues, track changes, and troubleshoot problems.
• Traces: Traces provide a detailed record of the transactions and requests that occur within a Kubernetes cluster. Traces can be used to identify bottlenecks, diagnose performance issues, and optimize application performance.

To achieve observability in Kubernetes, various monitoring and logging tools are used, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd, and Jaeger. These tools enable DevOps teams to collect, analyze, and visualize metrics, logs, and traces to gain insights into the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment.

Why Is Kubernetes Observability So Important? 

Here are a few reasons why observability is so important:

• Proactive monitoring: Observability enables DevOps teams to monitor their Kubernetes environment proactively and detect issues early. Early detection can help prevent issues from impacting end-users and avoid potential downtime and loss of revenue. It also enables DevOps teams to identify trends and patterns in their Kubernetes environment and make informed decisions on how to optimize their infrastructure and applications.
• Efficient troubleshooting: With observability, DevOps teams can quickly diagnose and troubleshoot issues when they do arise. By analyzing metrics, logs, and traces, they can pinpoint the root cause of the issue and take the necessary action to resolve it before the issue affects end-users. It helps maintain the availability and reliability of applications and reduce the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of incidents.
• Improved performance: Improved performance is essential for ensuring that containerized applications can handle increased user demand and scale effectively. By analyzing performance data, DevOps teams can identify bottlenecks and optimize performance accordingly, improving the user experience and reducing the risk of application failures.
• Better collaboration: Observability helps to improve collaboration between developers and operations teams. By providing a common set of tools and data, DevOps teams can work together to diagnose and troubleshoot issues, improving the speed and efficiency of problem resolution.

3 Key Challenges of Kubernetes Observability 

Multiple Components

Kubernetes clusters consist of several interconnected components, such as nodes, pods, services, and controllers, that work together to run containerized applications. Observing each of these components and their interactions with each other can be complex and time-consuming. Additionally, each component generates a significant amount of data, such as logs, metrics, and traces, which makes it challenging to aggregate, analyze, and visualize the data from multiple sources.

Dynamic Environments

Kubernetes is designed to be dynamic and flexible, which means that pods and containers can be added, removed, or moved between nodes frequently. This dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments can make it challenging to track the location and status of each component at any given time. Additionally, the complexity of Kubernetes environments can increase as the number of nodes and pods grows, and this can make it challenging to troubleshoot issues or identify the root cause of problems.

Rapid Application Deployment

Kubernetes allows developers to deploy new versions of applications quickly and easily, which can be beneficial for maintaining fast and agile development cycles. However, the rapid deployment of applications can also create observability challenges. For example, developers may need to monitor the health and performance of multiple versions of an application, each running on a different set of pods or nodes. This can make it challenging to manage and troubleshoot issues across multiple versions of an application.

How to Tackle Kubernetes Observability Challenges 

Correlating Log Data and Performance Information

One way to tackle the challenges of Kubernetes observability is by correlating log data and performance information. By combining these two sources of data, DevOps teams can gain deeper insights into the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment and quickly identify and resolve issues. 

Here are some steps that DevOps teams can take to effectively correlate this information:

• Choose your data: Define the specific metrics, logs, and traces needed to monitor to gain insights into the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment. This can include CPU and memory usage, network traffic, and application-specific metrics, as well as application logs and traces.
• Collect and monitor: Use monitoring and logging tools to collect and store data from the Kubernetes environment. This can include tools such as Prometheus for metrics, Fluentd for logs, and Jaeger for traces. It’s important to ensure that these tools can handle the large volume of data generated by Kubernetes environments and can store the data in a way that enables easy access and analysis.
• Analyze and correlate: Once data is collected and stored, DevOps teams can use analysis tools such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Grafana to analyze the data and gain insights into the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment. This can include analyzing trends and patterns over time, identifying anomalies, and correlating log data with performance information.
• Alerting and visualization: To ensure that DevOps teams can quickly identify and resolve issues, it’s important to set up alerting and visualization tools. These tools can alert DevOps teams when specific metrics or logs reach certain thresholds, and provide real-time visualization of the performance and health of the Kubernetes environment.
• Take action: Once issues are identified, DevOps teams should take action to resolve them. This can include scaling applications up or down, adjusting infrastructure configurations, or modifying application code.

Understanding In-cluster Communication

Kubernetes relies on a complex network of components to facilitate communication between the various parts of a cluster, including pods, services, and other Kubernetes objects. By understanding how this in-cluster communication works, DevOps teams can gain a better understanding of the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment. 

Here are some steps to take to better understand in-cluster communication:

• Understand Kubernetes networking: Kubernetes uses a complex networking model that includes a variety of networking plugins and components. DevOps teams should take the time to understand the basics of Kubernetes networking, including how IP addresses are assigned, how networking policies are implemented, and how traffic is routed between pods and services.
• Monitor network traffic: DevOps teams should use network monitoring tools to gain insights into the network traffic within their Kubernetes environment. This could include using tools such as tcpdump or Wireshark to analyze network traffic, or using tools such as Istio or Linkerd to monitor service mesh traffic.
• Correlate networking data with performance data: Once network data is collected and analyzed, DevOps teams can correlate this data with performance data to gain deeper insights into the performance and health of their Kubernetes environment. This can include correlating network latency with application latency, or correlating network traffic patterns with pod resource utilization.
• Use network policies: Kubernetes provides a variety of networking policies that can be used to control the flow of traffic within a cluster. DevOps teams should use these policies to ensure that traffic is routed efficiently and securely within the Kubernetes environment.
• Troubleshoot issues: If issues are identified, DevOps teams should use the insights gained from monitoring in-cluster communication to troubleshoot and resolve the issues. This can include adjusting networking policies, scaling up or down resources, or modifying application code to optimize performance.

Tracing Requests Throughout the Stack

By tracing requests, DevOps teams can gain a deeper understanding of how requests are processed and how they flow through the various parts of the tech stack, including the application, Kubernetes, and other dependencies. 

It typically involves defining the relevant tracing data, such as request IDs, service names, timestamps, and latency, and instrumenting code. DevOps teams can instrument their application code with tracing libraries such as OpenTelemetry or Zipkin. These libraries can be used to automatically generate and propagate tracing data throughout the tech stack.

Leverage Observability Automation Tools

Observability automation tools are software solutions that automate the collection, analysis, and visualization of data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and traces, to provide real-time insights into the health and performance of a system. These tools are designed to help teams manage the complexity and dynamic nature of modern IT environments, including microservices, containers, and Kubernetes clusters.

Observability automation tools typically use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to process large amounts of data and identify patterns, anomalies, and trends. They can also provide automated alerts and recommendations to help teams identify and resolve issues quickly.

Here are some examples of observability automation tools:

• Log aggregation and analysis tools: These tools collect logs from multiple sources and provide a centralized view of system events. They can help teams troubleshoot issues quickly by providing real-time alerts and insights into the behavior of the system.
• Metric collection and analysis tools: These tools collect performance metrics, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and network traffic, from various sources and provide real-time visualization of system health. They can help teams optimize the performance of their systems and applications by identifying areas of underutilization or overutilization.
• Tracing and profiling tools: These tools capture detailed information about the interactions between components in a system and help teams diagnose issues that span multiple components. They can help teams understand the root cause of issues and improve the reliability and performance of their systems.
• AI-powered observability platforms: These platforms use machine learning algorithms to automatically analyze data from multiple sources, including logs, metrics, and traces, to provide real-time insights into the behavior of a system. They can help teams identify and resolve issues quickly by providing automated alerts, recommendations, and root-cause analysis.

Kubernetes Observability with Lumigo

Lumigo is a troubleshooting platform, purpose-built for microservice-based applications. Developers using Kubernetes to orchestrate their containerized applications can use Lumigo to monitor, trace and troubleshoot issues fast. Deployed with zero-code changes and automated in one-click, Lumigo stitches together every interaction between micro and managed service into end-to-end stack traces. These traces, served alongside request payload data, give developers complete visibility into their container environments. Using Lumigo, developers get:End-to-end virtual stack traces across every micro and managed service that makes up a serverless application, in context

• API visibility that makes all the data passed between services available and accessible, making it possible to perform root cause analysis without digging through logs 
• Distributed tracing that is deployed with no code and automated in one click 
• Unified platform to explore and query across microservices, see a real-time view of applications, and optimize performance

To try Lumigo for Kubernetes, check out our Kubernetes operator on GitHub