Monitoring Kubernetes in the Cloud – VMware Cloud Community

Kubernetes is becoming a standard with the cloud. This means cloud operators need to be able to manage and monitor Kubernetes in the cloud. VMware helps them with vRealize Operations.

Kubernetes is now becoming an integrated part of the cloud platform. This also requires VMware cloud administrators to be able to see how the Kubernetes installation is performing and have the ability to monitor how the apps are performing.

Within most customer datacenters there is a VMware based cloud. vRealize Operations is the tool of choice when it comes to monitoring the VMware estate. It has become a robust system for managing and monitoring the virtual machines on top of the platform.

This gives the cloud administrators full insight from an infrastructure perspective and is key to understand how the workloads in the cloud are performing.

But now with Kubernetes becoming a standard for managing container workloads it becomes important that cloud administrators also have the ability to monitor those workloads.

Kubernetes support in vRealize Operations

VMware has been working to integrate Kubernetes support into vRealize Operations. Monitoring Kubernetes is a “first class citizen” in the vRealize Operations tooling. Cloud administrators need to be able to manage Kubernetes workloads in the same way as they manage virtual machine workloads.

Below is a graphical representation on how vRealize Operations can connect to Kubernetes workloads.

Basically, there are 2 ways to be able to connect to Kubernetes workloads and get visibility:

1. vRealize Operations Management Pack for Kubernetes; This is a management pack for vRealize Operations provided by VMware. It gives cloud administrators the ability to connect to Kubernetes clusters.
2. Native integration for vSphere with Tanzu; vSphere 7 now provides native Kubernetes integration (vSphere with Tanzu) out-of-the-box. vRealize Operations integrates natively with this vSphere component.

This gives full visibility into your Kubernetes deployments if you are either running native Kubernetes, a distribution (for example Openshift) or vSphere with Tanzu.

All of this is to empower the cloud administrator with the ability to manage and monitor Kubernetes deployments on top of the platform.

Advantages of Kubernetes integration

And of course the integration of Kubernetes in vRealize Operations comes with advantage to cloud administrator, such as:

• Create a holistic view of your cloud infrastructure across virtual machines, containers and the Kubernetes stack;
• Manage a variety of Kubernetes flavours. vRealize Operations provides the capability to monitor many types of Kubernetes that runs of the vSphere platform;
• Empower cloud administrators to be pro-active when it comes to Kubernetes deployments and help the consumers (Developers and Lines of Business) to keep being productive;
• Connect with 3^rd party monitoring tooling (i.e. Prometheus) to ingest monitoring data for correlation;
• Ability to correlate the compute, storage and network components to the Kubernetes stack allowing you to trace issues from the infrastructure to Kubernetes;
• Have the ability to do capacity and cost management, performance optimization and compliance checking for the underlying infrastructure running Kubernetes.

As you can see the addition of Kubernetes management to vRealize Operations brings lots of advantages to the cloud administrator. Enabling them to offer Kubernetes as part of the cloud platform. Servicing the needs of the consumer: the developers and lines of business.

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