Top 8 Monitoring Tools for Kubernetes

What Are Kubernetes Monitoring Tools? 

Kubernetes monitoring tools are software solutions that help track the performance, health, and resource usage of Kubernetes clusters, nodes, and containers. These tools provide insights into the various components of a Kubernetes environment, enabling administrators and developers to maintain and optimize their applications.

Best Kubernetes Monitoring Tools  

1. Kubernetes Dashboard

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard

Kubernetes Dashboard is a web-based user interface (UI) that allows users to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters and applications running on them. It provides an overview of the cluster’s state, allowing users to interact with Kubernetes components, such as deployments, services, and pods.

The Kubernetes dashboard provides the following features:

• Cluster monitoring: View the health and status of the cluster, including nodes, namespaces, and persistent volumes.
• Workloads management: Manage deployments, replica sets, stateful sets, daemon sets, jobs, and cron jobs.
• Services and discovery: Manage and create services, ingresses, and network policies.
• Config and storage: Manage config maps, secrets, and persistent volume claims.
• Access control: Control access to the dashboard using role-based access control (RBAC), allowing users with different permissions to access specific cluster resources.
• Troubleshooting: Access logs, events, and other details of running pods to identify and resolve issues.

To use the Kubernetes dashboard, you need to deploy it to your cluster. The deployment process typically involves applying a YAML file provided by the Kubernetes project, followed by configuring access through an authentication method such as token-based authentication or the Kubernetes API. Once deployed and configured, you can access the dashboard via a web browser, using a secure URL generated during the setup process.

2. Prometheus

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It is widely used for monitoring containerized and microservice-based environments, such as Kubernetes. Prometheus was initially developed by SoundCloud and is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a graduated project.

Prometheus provides the following features:

• Multi-dimensional data model: Prometheus uses a time-series data model with metric names and key-value pairs called labels, enabling flexible and powerful querying.
• Powerful query language: Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) allows users to aggregate, filter, and manipulate collected metrics for analysis and alerting purposes.
• Data collection: Prometheus uses a pull model to collect metrics from various targets using HTTP, allowing it to discover and scrape metrics from dynamic environments easily.
• Storage: Prometheus stores collected time-series data on a local disk in an efficient, custom format. It also supports remote storage integrations for long-term storage and additional data-processing options.
• Alerting: Prometheus integrates with its Alertmanager component, which can deduplicate, group, and route alerts to various notification channels (e.g., email, Slack, PagerDuty) based on user-defined rules.
• Visualization: Prometheus provides a built-in expression browser for ad-hoc queries and basic visualization. However, it is often used with Grafana, a popular open-source dashboarding and visualization tool, for more advanced and customizable visualizations.

Prometheus is commonly used to monitor Kubernetes clusters, as it integrates well with the Kubernetes API and can automatically discover and scrape metrics from various cluster components, including nodes, containers, and services.

3. cAdvisor

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/google/cadvisor

cAdvisor (short for “Container Advisor”) is an open-source container monitoring tool developed by Google. It provides real-time information about the performance, resource usage, and overall health of running containers. cAdvisor is primarily focused on monitoring individual containers and is often used in conjunction with other tools, such as Prometheus, to provide comprehensive monitoring of containerized environments.

Key features of cAdvisor include:

• Resource usage metrics: cAdvisor collects and exports various container-level metrics, such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage, for each running container.
• Container lifecycle events: cAdvisor monitors and tracks container events like start, stop, and pause, providing insights into the lifecycle of containers.
• Web UI: cAdvisor offers a built-in web user interface that displays real-time statistics and historical data about container performance.
• REST API: cAdvisor provides a REST API to access container metrics programmatically.
• Integration with Prometheus: cAdvisor can expose container metrics in a format compatible with Prometheus, enabling users to scrape and store these metrics using Prometheus for further analysis and visualization.

cAdvisor is often deployed as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes clusters, which ensures that an instance of cAdvisor runs on each node, monitoring the containers on that specific node. While cAdvisor is built into the Kubernetes kubelet (the primary node agent) and provides some basic container metrics, the standalone cAdvisor offers additional insights and a web UI for better visibility into container performance.

4. Jaeger

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-kubernetes

Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing system designed to monitor and troubleshoot microservices and distributed applications. It was originally developed by Uber Technologies and is now part of the CNCF as a graduated project. Jaeger helps developers gain insights into their applications by capturing, visualizing, and analyzing traces that represent the flow of requests through a system.

Key features of Jaeger include:

• Distributed context propagation: Jaeger captures and propagates context information, such as trace and span IDs, across different services and components of an application. This context information helps correlate events and logs across the entire request lifecycle.
• High scalability: Jaeger is designed to handle high-velocity and high-volume trace data, enabling it to scale horizontally as the monitored application grows.
• Root cause analysis: By visualizing the traces and identifying bottlenecks or errors in the system, developers can perform root cause analysis to optimize their applications and improve overall performance.
• Adaptive sampling: Jaeger supports adaptive sampling, allowing users to control the rate of trace collection based on their needs and infrastructure constraints.
• Backend storage support: Jaeger provides pluggable storage backends, such as Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and Kafka, for storing trace data.
• Integration with other tools: Jaeger can be integrated with other Kubernetes observability tools like Prometheus for metrics and Grafana for visualization to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution.

In Kubernetes, Jaeger can be deployed as a set of containerized services, including the agent, collector, query service, and storage backend. It can be used to monitor and troubleshoot containerized microservices and distributed applications running in a Kubernetes cluster.

5. Elastic Stack (ELK)

License: MIT license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/deviantony/docker-elk

Elastic Stack, commonly referred to as the ELK Stack, is a collection of open-source software products designed for searching, analyzing, and visualizing large volumes of data in real-time. The acronym “ELK” stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, which are the primary components of the stack. In more recent versions, Elastic Stack also includes a lightweight data shipper called Beats.

Here is a brief overview of each component:

• Elasticsearch: A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine built on top of Apache Lucene. It provides fast, scalable, and near real-time search capabilities, as well as advanced data indexing and storage. Elasticsearch is often used for log and event data analysis, full-text search, and other big data use cases.
• Logstash: A data processing pipeline that ingests, processes, and forwards data to various outputs, such as Elasticsearch, file systems, or other databases. Logstash supports a wide range of data sources, including log files, message queues, and network data, and provides a rich set of filters and transformations to manipulate and enrich the data.
• Kibana: A web-based visualization and analytics platform that provides an interface for exploring and analyzing data stored in Elasticsearch. Kibana allows users to create interactive dashboards, visualizations, and reports, as well as perform advanced data analysis using features like machine learning, anomaly detection, and alerting.
• Beats: Lightweight data shippers that collect various types of data from different sources and forward it to Logstash or Elasticsearch. Beats include different modules like Filebeat for log files, Metricbeat for system metrics, Packetbeat for network data, and Heartbeat for uptime monitoring.

The Elastic Stack can be used to monitor and analyze logs, metrics, and events generated by a Kubernetes cluster and its applications. The stack can help gain insights into the performance and health of Kubernetes applications, troubleshoot issues, and ensure the proper functioning of these systems.

6. Telepresence

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/telepresenceio/telepresence

Telepresence is an open-source development tool for Kubernetes that enables developers to work efficiently with local development environments while still interacting with remote Kubernetes clusters. It allows developers to run and debug their services locally while proxying them to a remote Kubernetes cluster.

Telepresence works by swapping a running Kubernetes deployment with a two-way network proxy that routes traffic between the local development environment and the remote cluster. This allows the local service to communicate with remote services and vice versa, as if they were all running within the same cluster.

To use Telepresence, developers need to install the Telepresence CLI tool, configure their local environment, and run a command to swap the remote deployment with the local proxy. Once set up, they can start developing and debugging their services locally while still maintaining full access to the remote Kubernetes cluster.

7. kubewatch

License: Apache-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/vmware-archive/kubewatch

Kubewatch is an open-source Kubernetes monitoring tool that sends notifications about changes in a Kubernetes cluster to various communication channels, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. It monitors Kubernetes resources, such as deployments, services, and pods, and alerts users in real-time when changes occur.

It is a lightweight, easy-to-use tool that complements other Kubernetes monitoring solutions, such as Prometheus or Grafana, by providing real-time notifications about resource changes in a Kubernetes cluster.

8. Zabbix

License: GPL-2.0 license

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring solution designed for tracking the performance, availability, and health of networks, servers, applications, and other IT infrastructure components. It offers a comprehensive, scalable, and customizable monitoring platform that is suitable for various environments, from small businesses to large enterprises.

Key features of Zabbix include:

• Data collection: Zabbix supports multiple methods for collecting data, such as agent-based monitoring, SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), JMX (Java Management Extensions), IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), and custom scripts.
• Auto-discovery: Zabbix can automatically discover and monitor new devices, services, and applications in the network or environment without manual intervention.
• Distributed monitoring: Zabbix supports distributed monitoring, allowing users to monitor remote locations, multiple data centers, and large-scale IT environments.
• Flexible triggers and alerts: Zabbix provides customizable triggers, which are rules that define conditions for alerting based on collected data. Users can create complex expressions and configure notifications to various channels, such as email, SMS, or instant messaging applications.
• Visualization and dashboards: Zabbix offers built-in graphing, mapping, and dashboarding capabilities for visualizing collected data, making it easier to analyze trends and identify issues.

While Zabbix is not specifically designed for monitoring Kubernetes, it can be extended and customized to monitor containerized environments. Users can integrate Zabbix with Kubernetes by deploying Zabbix agents on Kubernetes nodes or using custom scripts and templates to collect metrics from Kubernetes APIs and components.

Tips from the expert

Itiel Shwartz

Co-Founder & CTO

Itiel is the CTO and co-founder of Komodor. He’s a big believer in dev empowerment and moving fast, has worked at eBay, Forter and Rookout (as the founding engineer). Itiel is a backend and infra developer turned “DevOps”, an avid public speaker that loves talking about things such as cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Python, observability, and R&D culture.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you choose and effectively use Kubernetes monitoring tools:

Use Multiple Tools for Comprehensive Monitoring

Combine different monitoring tools to cover all aspects of your Kubernetes environment. For example, use Prometheus for metrics, Jaeger for tracing, and ELK stack for logs to get a full picture of your system’s health.

Standardize on a Common Visualization Platform

Use a common platform like Grafana to visualize data from multiple monitoring tools. This centralizes your monitoring efforts and provides a unified view of your Kubernetes clusters.

Automate Monitoring Setup with Helm

Use Helm charts to automate the deployment and configuration of monitoring tools. This ensures that your monitoring stack is consistently deployed across different environments.

Integrate Monitoring with CI/CD Pipelines

Integrate your monitoring tools with CI/CD pipelines to automatically monitor new deployments. This helps in detecting and resolving issues early in the deployment process.

Focus on SLOs and SLIs

Define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) to ensure that your applications meet performance and reliability targets. Use tools like Prometheus and Grafana to track these metrics.

Kubernetes Monitoring Tools: Head to Head

The following comparison table can help you compare the features of the 8 Kubernetes monitoring tools to select the one that best suits your needs.

Kubernetes Monitoring Tools with Komodor

Komodor is a dev-first platform that streamlines the operations and troubleshooting of Kubernetes apps. It acts as the monitoring hub for Kubernetes workloads, providing enhanced visibility into your clusters and integrating with popular monitoring tools like Datadog and Grafana for clear metric and event visualization. Additionally, it features static monitors that enforce best practices and prevent misconfigurations, and historical data retention that lets you see a complete timeline of events leading up to the current state.

Moreover, Komodor’s App View feature reduces the cognitive load on developers’ by filtering out irrelevant data, ensuring that they stay informed about their app’s performance data and can take swift action when issues arise. By mitigating the overwhelming flow of data that emerges from various dashboards and APMs, Komodor helps developers own their apps e2e and operate them independently.
To learn more about how Komodor can make it easier to empower you and your teams to troubleshoot K8s, sign up for our free trial.