KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

It’s critical for users and cluster administrators to understand the health of their containers and pods and be able to monitor them. Despite of the fact that the health monitoring of the cluster is critical, it is still a mystery for many k8s users. How can these signals help to keep the clusters running or pinpoint the issues before it is too late? We will going in depth to describe where those metrics originate, how they are measured, and what components are involved to make this space less complicated. This presentation will outline the full pipeline of how these signals are collected and processed for pods and containers work starting from the cgroups in the linux kernel ending with prometheus metrics and dashboards. We will discuss future work in this space. The kubernetes community is currently ongoing a large effort to move container metrics away from cAdvisor into the container runtime as part of Kubernetes Enhancement 2371, “CRI Pod Container Stats” which aims to move metrics into the container runtime. We will discuss the goals of this effort and how it will impact the monitoring pipeline. This work will unlock new features and improve performance helping users and cluster administrators to be in control of their deployments.