Unravel the hidden mysteries of your cluster with the new Kubernetes Dashboards

By Jesus Ángel Samitier - MAY 6, 2021

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One of the greatest challenges you may face when creating Kubernetes dashboards is getting the full picture of your cluster. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration, but it also has a very steep learning curve.

We, at Sysdig, use Kubernetes ourselves, and also help hundreds of customers dealing with their clusters every day. We are happy to share all that expertise with you in the Kubernetes Dashboards. With the right dashboards, you won’t need to be an expert to troubleshoot or optimize your cluster.

Kubernetes Dashboards aren’t just handy in troubleshooting situations. They are also a very useful resource for doing capacity planning. They can help you ensure you’re not having extra costs due to an over-allocation of platform resources. Also, you will be certain that the platform can support new workloads.

In this article, we are introducing the new Kubernetes Dashboards in Sysdig Monitor, which will help you get a better understanding of your Kubernetes cluster status. The new Kubernetes Dashboards not only offer you a vast collection of dashboards but also guide you through them, making it easier to troubleshoot different situations.

screenshot of the 'underutilization of allocated resources' dashboard that shows the percentage of resources used vs requested

The Underutilization of Allocated Resources dashboards help you find if there are unused CPU or memory

A more intuitive way of monitoring your cluster

Kubernetes Dashboards in Sysdig Monitor aren’t just a bunch of metrics in a panel; they are organized to be use-case-oriented. This way, they build a well structured, opinionated guide through your Kubernetes cluster.

Reading the tips Sysdig Monitor offers in the Kubernetes Dashboards helps troubleshoot problems faster, understand why they are happening, and get to the root cause right away.

With Kubernetes Dashboards, you won’t need to be a Kubernetes expert to increase the performance and availability of your clusters.

screenshot of the Kubernetes Cluster Capacity dashboard, showing the nodes and namespaces capacity

The Kubernetes Cluster Capacity dashboard helps you troubleshoot pods stuck in a pending state due to starvation of resources

Take troubleshooting to the next level

Kubernetes dashboards in Sysdig Monitor are fully Kubernetes native. You can start using and customizing them in no time.

Imagine that someone in your team updates an image with a breaking change. Suddenly, some Pods begin restarting in a loop with a CrashLoopBackOff error. Quickly, you go to the Kubernetes Resources/Deployments dashboard and see there are some pods not ready.

In this animation, the user is troubleshooting a CrashLoopBackOff situation caused by a broken image deployed

In this animation, the user is troubleshooting a CrashLoopBackOff situation caused by a broken image deployed

Then, you learn that some of the containers in the same workload are using different images thanks to:

  • All the information that Sysdig is guiding you through in the dashboard.
  • The Event Overlay, which graphically shows you an event-based context to troubleshoot the issue.

screenshot of showing the modal window that appeared after clicking the stream of events, showing all the events that happened in the cluster, sorted by date and time

Event Overlay in Kubernetes Dashboards

Finding the needle in a haystack

Comparing the behavior of different containers in different clusters is as easy as a mouse click in the top filter bar of the Kubernetes Dashboards. It doesn’t matter if you use multi-region and/or multi-provider.

This way, Kubernetes Dashboards let you check that one app is working well through all of your infrastructure. Also, the dashboards let you troubleshoot potential issues by drilling down from the clusters to a particular container.

Screenshot of the filter bar where you can filter the results by team, cluster, namespace, pod and container.

You can filter your cluster data from cluster to container with a simple click

We help you optimize and allocate resources

Critical situations aren’t the only circumstances when a DevOps engineer needs to check out the Kubernetes dashboards. Using the dashboards to improve cluster configuration is something every SRE should do once in a while.

At Sysdig, we are Kubernetes experts. You can trust us not only for troubleshooting your cluster, but also for configuring it to get the most out of your infrastructure.

The Capacity Optimizer dashboard helps you configure the optimal resource requests and limits for CPU and memory by showing the suggested best practices and meaningful tips, allowing you to set the better values for the studied containers.

Using the Capacity Optimizer dashboard is key to avoid extra-costs in your infrastructure and safely allocate resources for your cluster.

in this animation, the user is navigating through thee Capacity Optimizer dashboard to learn what's the appropriate value for CPU and Memory requests.

The capacity optimizer helps you decide the requests and limits by suggesting values based on similar containers in your infrastructure

When you are creating a new workload, you probably don’t know what the state of the cluster is and if your pods are going to fit. You should not only be examining the CPU and memory requestable, but also the CPU and memory free in each node.

Sometimes there is space in the cluster as a whole but not in each node. Checking the state of each node, you can prepare your workloads in advance to make sure they are sized correctly before you deploy.

screenshot of the Capacity - New Resources Allocator dashboard showing a guide of how to allocate resources

The New Resources Allocator dashboard will guide you through that process to ensure you that every new resource is going to fit well.

Focus on what is important

We are shipping all these dashboards in the latest release of our hosted SaaS service, and they work with your Kubernetes cluster out-of-the-box.

Sysdig Monitor won’t just configure your cluster dashboards for you. It will also help you understand what is happening and why, by guiding you through all the processes.

This feature is available to existing customers starting in the Sysdig US-East region, and will be rolled out to our other regions over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, see ServiceVision for Prometheus in action in our Supercharging Kubernetes Labels and Metrics webinar!

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