How to monitor your clusters

Gaining more insights into the state of the Kubernetes control plane was a highly requested feature form STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE) customers. With Observability, STACKIT already provides a managed monitoring solution and we created an easy-to-use integration between our STACKIT services.

Connecting an Observability service with SKE

You need and an existing Observability instance to use the monitoring.

As with all STACKIT Kubernetes Engine features, you have two options to active and configure them: The portal and the SKE API.

Portal

1. Navigate to the Kubernetes overview
2. Select an existing cluster or create a new one

Existing cluster

For an existing SKE cluster, navigate the new “Monitoring” section in the STACKIT Cloud Portal and select an Observability instance

New cluster

For new clusters, select an existing Observability instance during the creation process underneath the “Monitoring” section.

API

To configure the Observability integration via the API, you need to obtain the Observability instance ID. You can find this ID in the Observability dashboard in the “API” section, named “Instance ID”.

For both new and existing clusters, specify a cluster JSON object, and add the following to the “extension” field:

Create Kubernetes resources

{
  "extensions": {
    "observability": {
      "observabilityInstanceId": "<observability instance id from portal>",
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Recommendations on Observability instance sizing

The volume of metrics that the SKE service exposes is quite high, and also depends on the number of Pods, Nodes and Services. Therefore, we can give no one-size-fits-all recommendation for how to size your Observability instance. Nevertheless, you should always select at least a Basic Plan, even for small clusters with little workload. Larger clusters potentially require larger plans. If you have questions or need assistance sizing your Observability instance, don not hesitate to contact our customer support.

Viewing Kubernetes metrics in Grafana

For your convenience, Observability provides a default Kubernetes dashboard for Grafana out of the box. You can find it in the STACKIT directory after signing in to your Grafana instance.

Further information

• How to use the SKE API to manage your clusters
• Observability