Insightful Monitoring of Kubernetes Clusters with Traces

Gain valuable insights into the performance of your Kubernetes cluster with trace monitoring. A guide that helps you optimize your operations for maximum efficiency and productivity.

unDraw by Katerina Limpitsouni

After delving into Kubernetes I quickly learned how vital it is to monitor everything that is going on inside a cluster. There are numerous combinations of tools one can use to monitor a k8s cluster and in this article, I am going to go through setting up one such method.

The scope of this article in defining the observability of a k8s cluster is restricted to:

• monitoring system-level information using Prometheus
• monitoring application-level information using Prometheus and Jaeger
• visualizing the collected information using Grafana

To create application-level information using Prometheus and Jaeger we are going to write a sample Python Flask application integrating Flask exporter and Jaeger tracing. We are also going to containerize our application and deploy it to our k8s cluster.

Setting up Prometheus