Most IT firms build their empire on Kubernetes, for its amazing flexibility and super scalability. RedHat OpenShift Container Platform (formerly OpenShift Enterprise) is a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, which initially only operated on-premise, and has been open to service for more than nine years. Given the increasing fever for hybrid cloud monitoring, firms are turning their heads towards the OpenShift Container Platform to build, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications.
No matter how scalable and flexible the software is, it becomes difficult to avoid blind spots and stay informed on the behavior of the software. The multi-layered infrastructure and huge deployments make it difficult to achieve complete visibility. To yield the full potential of a platform like OpenShift, admins need a clear overview of the infrastructure and a deep understanding about business-critical KPIs.
At Applications Manager, we thought a walk-through would help you understand the importance of OpenShift monitoring. Here is a quick glance into all the things you need to know about your OpenShift ecosystem, and how to monitor it well with the help of an OpenShift monitoring solution.
What to monitor
Here are the five crucial elements in OpenShift, and their respective metrics an IT admin should look out for while monitoring an OpenShift environment.
Nodes
Regardless of a node’s functionality, admins need to monitor each node that is associated with the OpenShift infrastructure. Metrics like CPU utilization, disk space, and the memory usage of every node need to be tracked in real-time.
OpenShift node monitoring will help to keep tabs on performance trends and analyze the behavior of the elements. This helps admins correlate the behavior and interdependency of the metrics and forecast future trends accurately. Admins can proactively eliminate the scope for bottlenecks and unexpected traffic by monitoring the ecosystem to the last detail.
Pods
Imagine a pod is employed to run a priority function for a given period. If the pod crashes down or dies, it would be a tedious task to track down the root cause of the malfunction in a complex environment like OpenShift.
Tracking each pod in real-time from your OpenShift monitoring tool helps in tracking the KPIs, activity, and resource consumption. This sheds light on the root causes that are responsible for errors and slowdowns.
Containers
Containers are the key components of an OpenShift environment. OpenShift container monitoring involves tracking metrics like resource utilization, status, and active duration periodically and analyzing their performance in real-time. This enables admins to pinpoint an issue, and its cause, and help resolve issues without affecting the user experience.
Replication controller
A replication controller is important to create pods and ensure that the required pods are always running. It gives admins the ability to scale, update, or delete the pods with a single command. There will be multiple controllers governing different pods, backing the performance of the respective pods they are deployed for.
These controllers need to be monitored to know the specifics like the number of replicas (replicated pods) that are in existence, the number of replicas that are already running, and the number of available replicas. This helps in understanding the behavior of containers and makes sure that crashing or deleted pods are not affecting container performance.
Jobs
Jobs govern the production and termination of pods and the processes that are running in the respective containers. With capabilities like automated cleanup, scheduling tasks, and resource management, jobs ensure seamless functioning of pods as a whole.
Admins need to know the number of pods that are being created and replicated by every job that is assigned; and the number of successful pods that are auto-terminated after completion. Attributes like health and performance should be actively tracked to ensure that the created pods are performing at optimal efficiency.
OpenShift monitoring with Applications Manager
Applications Manager has its own set of monitoring techniques that promote a well-managed IT environment. You can easily start monitoring OpenShift in Applications Manager by connecting to OpenShift through SSH protocol or using REST API calls without the need to deploy an agent. You also have the option of configuring Prometheus to scrape the OpenShift monitoring metrics that you need. Once you start collecting data, you can configure alerts and dashboards on OpenShift performance.
Applications Manager offers deep insights into the infrastructure, bringing out the unknown unknowns in such a humongous architecture. The customizable and functional OpenShift monitoring dashboard allows admins to stay informed on every KPI and keep an eye out for every container that is deployed. With our OpenShift cluster monitoring capability, track the network requests going through each cluster, the status and performance of pods deployed in it, and the capacity and resource utilization of the clusters. The tool’s advanced analytics and ML capabilities help admins stay updated on the emerging performance trends in the infrastructure. Its AI-based alerts reduce manual errors in alert escalation and help admins resolve issues beforehand. Automated responsive actions are proven to reduce a significant amount of effort and expenses for an environment like OpenShift. The ability to provide functional reports and forecast performance trends makes it easy for admins to stay prepared for the future.
Check if Applications Manager suits your requirements by downloading a free 30-day trial. Schedule a demo with our experts for a technical walk-through.
