Observe for Kubernetes: Our Newest Integration

Running Kubernetes can be a nightmare without proper visibility into the lifecycle, state, health, and auditability of your environment. Observe makes this easy by automatically ingesting all logs, metrics, traces, and state information from your K8s cluster and shaping it.

Running in Minutes

The Observe agent and integration for K8s can be installed in minutes with our manifest:

kubectl apply -f https://api.observeinc.com/v1/kubernetes/manifest

Troubleshooting Kubernetes

Kubectl is great for troubleshooting issues that happened recently but you can quickly run against its limitations when troubleshooting issues from days, weeks, or even months ago. Observe tracks the state of each K8s component and with our Time Machine feature allows you to wind back state. Here is an example of looking at the Pod lifecycle.

Portal to Your Logs

In distributed systems like Kubernetes, logs are often riddled with GUIDs that refer to other objects. Under the hood Observe is powered by Snowflake. Because it’s a relational database, we can easily figure out relationships in your K8s infrastructure and tell you what they mean. Our Teleport feature navigates all of the relationships across the data and returns us logs for the subset of jobs we want to look at. Here is an example where we ask Observe to find logs from a Kubernetes job.

Finding Root Cause

There are many common failure modes for K8s that an operator has to hold in their head when troubleshooting. With Observe we’ve captured these, out of the box, using what we call Notifications. Notifications are state changes that a user can view within the context of a Resource. For example, we automatically create Notifications when a container restarts too many times or gets stuck in a bad state. Optionally they can also be filtered to information changes like deploys, image changes, configuration, etc.

Security and Compliance

With the amount of change that happens in a K8s environment, it’s critically important to maintain an auditable record of who and what changed. Observe tracks all user-driven and system-driven state changes so that you can ask about particular changes over time. Because of our unique pricing model we make it cost-effective to retain this information for longer periods required for compliance certifications like SOC2.

Keeping Customers Happy

You can’t help your unhappy customers if you don’t know what the heck is going on in your environment. At the end of the day, Kubernetes is just one component of this. Using Observe to shape and relate data, our customers can tie infrastructure data from K8s with information about customer support tickets, build/test information, and end-user telemetry. It’s easy to tie in data that tells you about the health of your customers.

Get started with Observe today using our K8s integration or one of our other 250+ integrations. Request trial access here.