Kubernetes is key to observability Posted on : Mar 02 - 2021

It is critical that software engineers have access to the visibility they need.

Although observability and Kubernetes clusters are often considered mutually exclusive, they are closely intertwined. Engineers will be able to benefit from reliability, performance, and efficiency of well-managed Kubernetes but they will not be able to reach full capacity unless they are equipped with the knowledge of what apps are performing poorly and which resources are being underutilized.

What is observability?

Observability isn’t a single tool or technology. Rather observability is just how long it takes you to understand a problem. The average time it takes you to go from getting an alert to understanding the nature of what’s going wrong. That’s observability. When you restart a pod that’s not functioning properly, and that fixes the problem, your observability in that situation may be quite poor, since you never really understood what went wrong. Observability isn’t simply a set of dashboards displaying time-series metrics or a searchable index of your application logs; it’s a holistic approach to understanding your entire system, and how it operates.

Today’s complex software architectures demand high availability, reliability, security, and auto-scaling capabilities during peak time, the scale of these operations requires comprehensive management of logs, metrics, and traces to help debug and maintain these robust software systems. Thus, Kubernetes observability is now a top priority for engineering teams. View More