Overcoming Kubernetes Monitoring Challenges with Observability

At Logz.io, we’re seeing a very fast pace of adoption for Kubernetes–at this point, it’s even outpacing cloud adoption, with companies running on-prem fully adopting Kubernetes in production.

Why are companies going in this direction? Kubernetes provides additional layers of abstraction, which helps create business agility and flexibility for deploying critical applications. At the same time, those abstraction layers create additional complexity for observability.

Merely understanding what’s running in every cluster, node or pod is one of the top Kubernetes monitoring challenges. Things are moving all the time. The days of installing an application on a server and calling it a day are over. Now, the application is installed in a pod, and can be run in a place where it can be dynamically moved from one node to another, or dynamically extended, and reduce the number of pods in capacity.

Flexibility is driving complexity here. We’re seeing an increased security challenge due to the uncertainty of what’s actually running inside.

Kubernetes allows users to download container images of the Internet—many by proprietary vendors that perform relevant functions. But it’s almost impossible to know what’s actually running in production unless your environment is proactively being scanned and monitored. 

Organizations realized in the past few years that they need to be agile and run and deploy applications fast. With fast deployment, you can inadvertently introduce the kinds of security risks and vulnerabilities into your environment we’re seeing with Kubernetes adoption.

DevOps Pulse Respondents Paint the Kubernetes Picture

The evidence of these Kubernetes challenges are popping up everywhere, including in our newly-published 2023 DevOps Pulse Report, based on around 500 survey responses from personas ranging from developers to SREs and beyond.

The report shows organizations struggling to engage Kubernetes observability and security practices. Almost 50% of respondents cited Kubernetes as their main challenge to gaining full observability into their environment and about the same indicated Kubernetes security is the most difficult component of running the technology in production.

Additionally, some 80% of respondents highlighted that they either currently maintain or plan to implement a unified model for observability and security monitoring.

How to Address Kubernetes Monitoring Challenges

To combat these Kubernetes challenges, gaining knowledge of the system is a great place to start. Many organizations run Kubernetes without having the proper knowledge of how to actually deploy it.

Managed Kubernetes services are getting stronger—whether it’s EKS or Fargate on Amazon, or AKS on Azure. So, having knowledge of how Kubernetes is built and configured properly is the key in that scenario. 

Having proper observability set up is also critical. Kubernetes can have so many abstraction layers that if things go bad, you may not know where to look.

Cost is also having a huge impact on Kubernetes, and reducing associated costs is a critical component of running it in production. Companies are striving to reduce expensive cloud hosting costs, and with that comes Kubernetes. There’s often a tradeoff between cost and availability, where lowering the cost may also relate to a lower availability.

Your organization must understand the tradeoff on what’s the right cost for running clusters and the impact on both their availability and the security of your environment. 

How Logz.io Can Help with Your Kubernetes Observability

Since the introduction of our Kubernetes 360 solution in late 2022, we’ve been refining and extending this unified observability capability. We recently introduced the addition of security  and vulnerability scanning to Kubernetes 360 as we seek to make the capability even more useful and powerful.

Delivered via integration with Aqua Security’s open source-based Aqua Trivy vulnerability and misconfiguration scanning solution, this capability will now allow Logz.io Open 360™ platform users to quickly identify and resolve potential security issues introduced into their Kubernetes environments. 

To learn more, and see how your enterprise can overcome these Kubernetes challenges, sign up for your 30-day free trial of the Logz.io Open 360™ platform today.