Monitoring your Kubernetes application and the various components that it is made up of is essential to increase the reliability of your system, tune the performance, measure security risks and reduce cost. We have discussed these points in detail in our last week’s post and today we would be talking about some of the best tools you can use for Kubernetes monitoring. Each has its pros and cons, some are paid and some are free, so we would be discussing them in detail to help you make an informed decision.

Sematext

Sematext is a Saas monitoring solution for both traditional and microservices-based application deployments. It can capture metrics and events in real-time that you can structure, visualize and analyze, set alerts and notifications. This offering builds log analytic reports and customizable monitoring dashboards.

Pros

  • Easy to install
  • Auto-discovery of services and logs
  • Built-in Alerting and Anomaly detection
  • No infrastructure to maintain
  • Has a default dashboard and alerts to easily get you started

Cons

  • There is a lack of integration with some security tools
  • A complex user interface takes time to get used to

Pricing: Sematext gives you granular control over your needs and has a pricing template accordingly that you can check out here.

Datadog

A SaaS platform for monitoring, security and analytics that can be integrated and automated in the cloud. It provides real-time observability of your entire tech stack. Dashboards, high-resolution metrics and events are available for modification and visualization of the metrics.

Pros

  • Real-time interactive dashboards
  • Monitor user activities and gather user experience
  • Many integrations available

Cons

  • Limited Plans
  • Expensive

Pricing: You can check out Datadog pricing plans here.

New Relic

These monitoring tools gather metrics that keep track of data and metadata for nodes, deployments, pods and containers, allowing you to keep track of the hosts and front and back-end applications running within the Kubernetes clusters.

Pros

  • Gives full-stack observability
  • Issue detection and resolution are supported by AI

Cons

  • Expensive
  • Poor UX/UI

Pricing: You can check out New Relic pricing plans here.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace allows you to keep tabs on the dependencies and connections between hosts, containers and cloud instances. It also gives an overview of the availability and health of the apps and processes. It can easily integrate with over 500 products and combine their information as well.

Pros

  • Can be integrated with many products
  • Easy to adapt
  • Multiple pricing plans make purchases flexible

Cons

  • The interface has too much information and new users can get lost

Pricing: You can check out Dynatrace pricing plans here.

Prometheus

This is one of the most used Kubernetes monitoring tools because it’s open-source and also free to use. All the data is stored in a time series format and you can query that data using PromQL. The data can then be further visualized using other tools like Grafana because Prometheus itself lacks a dashboard.

Pros

  • Community is driven where issues are resolved quickly
  • Built-in monitoring and alerting system

Cons

  • Challenging to scale
  • No dashboard for visualization

Pricing: Free

Grafana

An open-source multi-platform tool for monitoring and observability that links every source accessible and help you keep track of data. Provides dynamic dashboards with multiple visualization formats such as graphs, histograms, geo maps etc. Has an integrated alert system that can be set up to visually establish alert criteria for important parameters.

Pros

  • Great at reporting and visualization
  • Compatible with various data sources

Cons

  • Limited dashboard design and management capabilities
  • No solution for data collection and storage

Pricing: Free

Jaeger

An end-to-end distributed tracing tool for monitoring and troubleshooting deployments and other distributed systems. It can be used to carry out service dependency analysis, root cause analysis, performance and latency optimization and many more important monitoring services.

Pros

  • Many instrumentations option
  • Ability to optimize latency and perform context propagation

Cons

  • Relatively new
  • Limited backend Integration

Pricing: Free

Kubernetes Dashboard

A web-based UI add-on for Kubernetes clusters that offers a simple way of managing, troubleshooting and monitoring your environment. Gives the ability to check the status of workload and view basic data such as resource optimization statistics across all nodes.

Pros

  • Easy to install using YAML files
  • Allows modification of individual Kubernetes resources

Cons

  • Limited metrics available
  • Lacks any visualization capabilities

Pricing: Free