Simplify K8s Integrations with Easy Connect

Logz.io is excited to announce Easy Connect, which will enable our customers to go from zero to full observability in minutes.

By automating service discovery and application instrumentation, Easy Connect provides nearly instant visibility into any component in your Kubernetes-based environment – from your infrastructure to your applications.

Since applications have been monitored, collecting logs, metrics, and traces have often been siloed and complex. Now it’s unified, it’s automated, and it just works.

And the best part? It’s all based on OpenTelemetry – making Logz.io the easiest route to configuring and deploying OpenTelemetry at scale.

Why we built Easy Connect

As cloud-native infrastructure and applications grow more complex, observability is critical to understanding exactly what is happening in your system, and why. Without it, we risk being blind to production issues that directly impact revenue-generating digital user experiences.

Unfortunately, capturing telemetry in real time from hundreds of ephemeral and interconnected services running on Kubernetes is no easy task.

That’s why the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation hosts projects like Fluentd, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus, which have risen to the challenge by offering Kubernetes-native integrations to collect data from ephemeral microservices architectures.

However, these data collection technologies can be burdensome to configure, upgrade, and maintain – especially when multiple different technologies are in production. Plus, instrumenting services to expose logs, metrics, and traces can be complex and time consuming.

With Easy Connect, service discovery, application instrumentation, and data collection is entirely automated. After deploying the Telemetry Collector – Logz.io’s OpenTelemetry-based agent – on a Kubernetes cluster, Easy Connect will discover every service in your cluster and provide the option to instrument each one.

As a result, Logz.io customers can begin collecting logs, metrics, and traces from any service in their Kubernetes-based environment with a single agent installation and a few clicks. The whole process takes minutes and provides visibility into everything – from your infrastructure to applications.

So, why did we build Easy Connect? To simplify and accelerate your path to full observability. It’s comprehensive data collection for Kubernetes, and it’s easier than ever.

Implementing Easy Connect to Collect Telemetry Data Fast

To install Easy Connect, simply run the command below:

helm repo update

helm install logzio-ezkonnect logzio-helm/ezkonnect -n ezkonnect --create-namespace

Next run the following command to access the UI in your browser, then go to http://localhost:8080

kubectl port-forward svc/ezkonnect-ui -n ezkonnect 8080:8080

At first you’ll see an empty interface. Easy Connect communicates with Telemetry Collector in order to discover and instrument services within the UI, so the next step is to install Telemetry Collector on your cluster.

Simply go to Logz.io’s integrations page and select the Telemetry Collector option at the top of the page. From there, choose one of the Kubernetes deployment options.

Now, simply copy the Logz.io-generated script and run it on your cluster.

If you’d like, you can hit ‘Advanced settings’ in the top right corner to prevent logs, metrics, or traces from being collected, to rename your agent, or to select specific Logz.io sub accounts as the data’s destination.

Once your Telemetry Collector is installed, you’ll see the option to select Easy Connect, which will bring up the page below. This is where you’ll see an inventory of all your services running Kubetrnetes, which have been automatically discovered by Easy Connect.

As you can see, you’ll have the option to instrument your applications to expose the relevant log and trace data with a single click! The tracing instrumentation uses the OpenTelemetry framework – providing the easiest way to configure and deploy OpenTelemetry available.

After deploying the relevant instrumentation, the data will begin streaming into your Logz.io account for analysis. All the data is correlated – making it easy to quickly gather context as you investigate a production issue.

Without needing to configure any dashboards, Logz.io will automatically surface the most critical data from your system for instant monitoring and analysis.

For example, Service List enables users to monitor service performance across their microservices architecture, and dive into investigations quickly.