Monitoring Application Metrics With Nutanix Karbon

The easy way

Photo by Alex Duffy on Unsplash

Overview

When you start running applications in your freshly deployed Karbon Kubernetes cluster, a requirement comes up very quickly: how-to implement monitoring ? Fortunately, Karbon includes everything required to do this cleanly.

When you deploy a new Kubernetes Cluster with Karbon, Prometheus Operator is installed by default and a Prometheus instance is also deployed and configured to monitor your Kubernetes cluster resources.

In this post, I will provide you an overview and a step-by-step setup guide to configure your Karbon Cluster in order to monitor both the cluster itself and your own applications and present this through a unified interface using Grafana.

What is Nutanix Karbon

Karbon is Nutanix’s enterprise Kubernetes managed solution that enables turnkey provisioning, operations, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes.

Get a production-ready Kubernetes Cluster up and running in 20 minutes. Then keep it running smoothly with built-in storage, centralized monitoring, and automated upgrades.

Unlike other Kubernetes solutions, Karbon integrates seamlessly with the entire Nutanix cloud-native stack, and dramatically simplifies Kubernetes without vendor lock-in. For Nutanix customers, Karbon is included in all AOS software editions.

What is Prometheus Operator

In Kubernetes, Operator is a term used to describe a class of software that helps automate the operation of another software . A Kubernetes Operator is typically designed to manage all the operational aspects surrounding the lifecycle of an application from initial configuration and deployment to updates and patches, scaling or just using it.

All of these can be integrated into Kubernetes constructs and invoked as needed. The idea is that by using Kubernetes operators, human involvement in the operation of an application can be reduced to a strict minimum or removed entirely.