Company
Date Published
Author
Dotan Horovits
Word count
1926
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In a modern landscape dominated by microservices and containerized applications, Kubernetes has emerged as a leading orchestrator for managing complex distributed systems. With this complexity comes the need for robust observability, which relies on the three pillars of logs, metrics, and traces to debug and maintain systems efficiently. The article explores how these pillars enhance system observability in Kubernetes environments, with logs capturing discrete system events, metrics providing numerical insights into system health, and traces revealing the end-to-end request paths within distributed systems. Various open-source tools are highlighted for implementing Kubernetes observability, including Jaeger for distributed tracing, Fluentd for log collection, Prometheus for metric automation, Grafana for data visualization, and OpenSearch for log analysis. Additionally, OpenTelemetry is introduced as a comprehensive framework for capturing observability signals in a cloud-native, vendor-agnostic manner. The Logz.io Open 360 platform is presented as a unified solution that integrates these open-source tools to offer a comprehensive view of Kubernetes environments, enhancing the ability to monitor application health, debug issues, and understand the impacts of changes within the infrastructure.