8 Cloud-based Kubernetes and Docker monitoring solutions

Efficient Kubernetes and Docker monitoring solutions can help you measure important metrics for your applications, such as application health, performance, speed, cost, and resource utilization.

In fact, both Kubernetes and Docker have important places in modern DevOps infrastructure. Docker lets you containerize and run your applications, and Kubernetes lets you manage those containers.

Although it is possible to manage thousands of containers using the Docker CLI, it is extremely difficult.

That said, using Kubernetes and Docker for the above process can significantly reduce and simplify your work. But it’s not easy. Containers need to be properly observed and analyzed to ensure that your application runs well without any issues.

To make that possible, you can monitor your applications and containers, log activity, track inefficiencies, and debug to ensure your services are running at optimal performance, uptime, and reliability. You need to make sure that.

This article describes some reliable Kubernetes and Docker monitoring solutions that can help you optimize your applications.

But first let’s talk.

What are Kubernetes, Docker, and containers?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source system that allows you to orchestrate or manage containers to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of applications. Developed by Google on June 7, 2014, but now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Kubernetes works with a variety of container runtimes, including Docker, CRI-O, and Containerd. Many cloud services offer Kubernetes-based PaaS or IaaS on which you can deploy Kubernetes.

docker

Docker refers to a diverse set of PaaS or Platform-as-a-Service products that leverage OS-level virtualization to deliver software and applications in packages called containers. And the software that hosts the containers is Docker Engine.

Docker was developed by Docker Inc. and released in 2013. You can package software applications with their dependencies. It also stores them in virtual containers that can run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. This allows you to run your software in a variety of locations, either in the public cloud or on-premises.

container

Containers are executable units of software that package application code with its dependencies and libraries so that it can run anywhere in the cloud, traditional IT, or on the desktop.

Containers leverage OS virtualization to allow multiple applications to share an operating system by isolating processes while controlling the resources they can access, such as CPU, disk storage, and memory. They are separate from each other and bundled in their own libraries, code, software, and configuration files.

However, they can still interact through defined channels. Additionally, all containers use a single OS kernel and consume fewer resources compared to virtual machines (VMs).

What does Kubernetes or Docker monitoring mean?

Kubernetes or Docker monitoring means regularly observing and analyzing Docker or Kubernetes-based software to optimize performance, health, cost, and efficiency. Software teams do this by measuring the metrics output by their applications. These metrics may include:

• latency
• Kubernetes cluster metrics (running containers, state, resource consumption, network input/output, etc.)
• Running and deploying Kubernetes pods
• CPU, disk, memory usage
• API server, data store, scheduler status, and controller life cycle metrics
• Costs per cluster, team, and product

Monitoring is an important part of gaining observability in application development. And analyzing such indicators can provide valuable information.

Why monitor Kubernetes and Docker containers?

If you don’t monitor your Kubernetes and Docker systems, it can be difficult to determine whether all processes are running properly due to limited observability and visibility of important metrics. It can also be difficult to identify issues that may impact your application and address them immediately before the situation worsens.

This can introduce a variety of risks in terms of security, data privacy, app performance and health, network, and cost.

Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the application. However, monitoring Docker and Kubernetes can be difficult as it requires efficient strategies.

For this reason, you need a good monitoring solution to make the process easier. Monitoring tools provide broad observability into each aspect of your application. To ensure your application is running optimally, you can track important metrics such as health, cost, and resource utilization.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits you can expect from a good monitoring tool.

Proactively identify and resolve problems

Efficient monitoring tools for Kubernetes and Docker systems allow you to proactively monitor all processes. Gain accurate insight into every small change and process in progress.

360-degree visibility makes it easy to track inefficiencies that may be impacting your system. As soon as it discovers any issues, bugs, or errors, the tool notifies you so you can fix them before they cause any damage. Additionally, you can monitor your system to prevent outages due to unnecessary resource use, resulting in cost savings.

Optimize app performance

One of the main reasons to use monitoring tools is to improve application performance. This tool works by gathering application insights and dependencies and creating performance benchmarks.

These insights help tools identify the root cause of anomalies and issues and notify software teams. This allows your team to take quick actions and steps to improve app performance.

Implement changes safely

Monitoring tools can monitor issues as they occur and notify your team in real-time, allowing you to quickly understand and resolve app vulnerabilities.

Otherwise, if such tools are not available, any changes you make to your application may result in worse performance because you will not know the underlying problems with your application. These vulnerabilities can impact the security of your application and make it more susceptible to viruses and malware. And in this age of cyber threats, you certainly can’t afford it.

Therefore, use monitoring tools to keep your app secure and robust, and make it easy to implement and enable changes.

When choosing Kubernetes and Docker monitoring tools, cloud-based solutions can be a good alternative to self-hosted monitoring solutions. Because you can harness the power of the cloud, enabling real-time monitoring from anywhere, allowing you to instantly resolve issues, make changes, and enjoy even more benefits.

Below, we have discussed some of the best cloud-based monitoring solutions for Kubernetes and Docker systems.

Logz.io

Monitor your Kubernetes and Docker systems using Logz.io , an integrated machine data analytics platform built on top of Prometheus and ELK stacks. Gain complete insight into your container environment to maximize availability and performance, providing a better experience for your customers.

Increase productivity by focusing on monitoring your infrastructure rather than monitoring your surveillance systems. A suite of optimization and analysis tools help you minimize your overall costs. You can also easily distribute metrics and logs using Kubernetes’ native integration with Docker. Additionally, pre-built metrics and Kibana dashboards simplify troubleshooting and monitoring.

Logz.io exceeds your expectations with availability, security, and scalability. You can use this platform to analyze your infrastructure and container data. Avoid issues that cause downtime using crowdsourcing and advanced machine learning.

Plus, receive real-time alerts in PagerDuty, Slack, ServiceNow, email, or any other management platform you use. Leverage the experience and knowledge of other engineers to troubleshoot exceptions and errors in a timely manner.

One day of log retention is available for free to collect a small amount of logs with advanced analysis. 7-day retention costs $0.92 per GB ingested.

sisdig

Sysdig Monitor provides a cloud and Kubernetes monitoring solution that is fully compatible with Prometheus. Get a complete overview of your pods, namespaces, and clusters, and dig deeper by exploring topology and metrics.

Jump-start your journey with pre-built dashboards and receive alerts on important events. Sysdig Monitor is an available cloud-based monitoring platform that is compatible with exporters and PromQL. This allows developers to approach standard monitoring solutions without having to worry about management.

Use Sysdig’s detailed data derived from low-level system calls to resolve issues. It also speeds up the capture of all actual system calls and enables fast RCA in case of problems. Additionally, see the relationship between the services that power your applications and the performance of your cloud infrastructure.

Sysdig provides features such as out-of-the-box dashboards, adaptive alerts, troubleshooting, and a curated Prometheus exporter. It also offers simple yet powerful instrumentation, SaaS delivery, carefully selected workflows, and more.

Sign up for free and get a 30-day free trial without providing any credit card details.

opus view

Opsview provides container monitoring tools that visually represent microservices and modern deployments as functional business solutions. This makes the solution easier for businesses to understand and for IT administrators to inspect.

Containers are a core technology in modern IT infrastructure because they provide resource isolation without the need for virtualized hardware in server virtualization. Opsview provides important information from your containers and confirms that they are up and running.

Monitor resource usage such as memory, size, and CPU. Additionally, wherever possible, you can monitor Docker based on container size, output of each container, etc. Opsview provides Kubernetes Opspack to monitor Kubernetes setups hosted in the cloud or locally.

Get access to monitor live usage metrics such as network status, disk, memory, and CPU from your cluster to individual pods. Opspack also collects data such as file descriptors, HTTP statistics, and works with DevOps platforms to provide optimal monitoring services. Simply put, its features help you solve complex challenges and provide flexible notifications to help you stay informed.

new relic pixie

Monitor Kubernetes and gain code-level insights using Pixie to dig deeper into your services and debug faster without changing your source code. Get real-time network flow, DNS, and service graphs to view latency and intra-cluster communication.

Additionally, gain knowledge about how pods, applications, containers, and nodes interact with each other. You can also simplify complex environments and drill down into infrastructure and application metrics using a rich, curated UI.

No long standardization processes, new deployments, or code updates required. You can get started quickly and easily. Additionally, automated telemetry uses eBPF to automatically collect events, traces, logs, and metrics for applications, OS, clusters, network layers, and Kubernetes.

Sign up for a free account and start monitoring your cloud infrastructure today.

ManageEngine Application Manager

Gain deeper visibility into the user experience and performance of your business infrastructure and application components with Applications Manager, an application performance monitoring software. It helps resolve performance issues throughout your application, from lines of code to URLs.

Automate and improve your DevOps and IT processes with Applications Manager to ensure better user experiences and business outcomes. It comes with web application monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, real-user monitoring, multi-cloud monitoring, server monitoring, database monitoring, advanced analytics, AIOps-assisted smart alerts, and more.

Plus, use Application Manager to optimize revenue and application usage, reduce MTTR, improve DevOps processes, respond quickly to incidents, move to the cloud with confidence, and ensure your applications meet your business goals. You can do things like meet.

It is available in two editions: Professional for 500 applications and Enterprise for 10000 monitors. Take advantage of our free trial.

sema text

Monitor Kubernetes performance events, logs, and metrics and install Sematext results as a DaemonSet, Kubernetes Operator, or Helm chart in seconds. With Sematext Cloud, you can gain powerful insights faster and gain complete visibility into the performance and health of your entire infrastructure using native, scalable container monitoring tools.

Sematext automatically identifies containers and monitors them to continuously track your dynamic environment. Actual container data allows for faster troubleshooting. From Docker Swarm to Docker Desktop, Sematext makes it easy to monitor container availability.

Get amazing dashboards to see your nodes, storage, deployments, pods, and more. You can also start monitoring logs, events, and metrics by installing the Sematext Agent Operator. Additionally, you can easily slice and dice your Kubernetes logs and metrics using extracted and structured data to quickly find problem pods and create log analysis reports.

Sematext Cloud monitoring costs $0.007/hour and logs $50/month.

dyna trace

Leverage AI and automation to monitor Kubernetes in an easy way with Dynatrace . Provides full-stack observability without changing container images, deployments, or code.

Dynatrace simplifies monitoring and unifies apps and infrastructure. Receive utilization and health metrics for all your pods, clusters, nodes, and containers, and find automated visibility into your apps and microservices.

Get enterprise-grade security for your critical data and track resource utilization, health, and availability for your Kubernetes workloads and infrastructure, including:

• Leverage group resources to achieve business continuity while minimizing costs
• Overview of workloads and pods to identify the differences between microservices and app instances
• All native Kubernetes events resolve platform issues such as failed image pulls, OOM containers, and crash loops.
• Visualize your Kubernetes environment with events and metrics that interest you.

Dynatrace’s AI engine saves additional resources and time by prioritizing and automatically identifying alerts from your Kubernetes infrastructure and apps. It continuously maps dependencies between entities and includes real-time topology, common data, causality-based AI, contextual models, and other features.

Start your free trial of Dynatrace today and explore amazing features for your business.

Instagram

Instana provides automatic performance and observability monitoring of Kubernetes applications. Monitor applications, orchestration, containers, and Kubernetes together to discover, observe, and map your Kubernetes application stack. You can also monitor the entire Kubernetes ecosystem, from pods and nodes to applications and containers in the Kbs distribution.

Get real-time correlation of infrastructure, Kubernetes, and application data. Ensure a healthy environment for your applications to run and operate properly with an easy-to-use dashboard. Manage Kubernetes distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon AKS, Pivotal PKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE.

Its pricing is transparent and simple. When billed annually, costs start at $75 per host per month and include SaaS deployment, unlimited users, over 20 technologies, and open standards such as OpenTracing, OpenCensus, Prometheus, and Jaeger.

Conclusion👩‍💻

Monitoring your application allows you to optimize the health of your application in terms of performance, speed, and reliability, and ensure that there are no bugs or errors that cause inefficiencies.

Therefore, use the Kubernetes and Docker monitoring solutions listed above to improve the overall health of your application and provide better security, performance, uptime, and user experience.