Monitor Amazon EKS Anywhere with Splunk

We are excited to partner with AWS in launching Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (EKS-A), an AWS-supported solution for managing Kubernetes clusters outside of the cloud-native Amazon EKS. Amazon EKS Anywhere is available to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on vSphere based environments now.

With Splunk’s support for EKS-A, our joint customers can confidently run Kubernetes in all environments — cloud-native with Amazon EKS, hybrid with Amazon Outposts and on-premises self-managed environments using EKS-A. Additionally, Splunk provides complete visibility into the underlying vSphere VM infrastructure to get the full context of performance characteristics from one single solution.

Manage and Operate Kubernetes On-Premises

Managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS abstracts out the Kubernetes cluster creation, management and operations of the Kubernetes Control Plane. Fully-managed services like EKS on Fargate remove the need to manage infrastructure, so DevOps teams can focus on their Kubernetes deployed applications. These services, however, do not run on-premises. Many organizations create Kubernetes clusters on-premises due to control, security, and compliance reasons. 

When running Kubernetes on-premises, the SRE and cloud operations teams need an easier and consistent way to manage Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure without the need to become an expert in Kubernetes internals.

Amazon EKS Anywhere enables DevOps teams with:

• Creating a single Kubernetes cluster using consistent tooling such as eksctl
• Reliable and straightforward workflows for cluster operations (create, update, backup, restore, delete, scale-up)
• Extending the workflow for managing a single cluster to a large number of clusters
• Consistent experience with Amazon EKS console
• Cluster authentication with AWS IAM policies and permissions
   

Amazon EKS-A uses Amazon EKS Distribution of Kubernetes (EKS Distro) as Kubernetes implementation. The EKS Anywhere GitHub repository provides an AWS-supported open-source distribution of Kubernetes and a suite of related projects from the Kubernetes ecosystem required to run a production cluster. EKS-D includes the same secure, validated, and tested components that power Amazon EKS.

Observability in Kubernetes Environments: Irrespective of Where You Run It

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides an easy and intuitive way to understand and manage the performance of Kubernetes worker nodes and deployed applications. In a previous blog, Kubernetes Navigator: Real-time Monitoring and AI-Driven Analytics for Kubernetes Environments Now Generally Available, we covered how DevOps and SRE teams can detect, triage and resolve performance issues in Kubernetes environments faster than ever before by taking advantage of the following features:

Dynamic Cluster Map: An aggregated, bird’s eye view to instantly understand the health of Kubernetes clusters

Drill-downs: Faster and effective troubleshooting with quick drill-down into any EKS-A object.- node, pods, containers or workloads

A global, at-a-glance view into the entire Kubernetes environment helps teams understand how the overall system is performing. It is equally important to have a granular, detailed view into individual components as teams narrow down to the source of the problem—drilling down from nodes to pods to containers to workloads.

Logs in context: Seamless pivot to contextual logs to gain granular insights, eliminate context switching and accelerate root cause analysis

Kubernetes Analyzer: AI-driven analytics to expedite troubleshooting and understanding the why behind performance anomalies. Kubernetes Analyzer automatically surfaces insights and recommendations to precisely answer, in real-time, what is causing anomalies across the entire Kubernetes cluster

Additional context from vSphere: Get complete visibility into your vSphere environment so you can detect and troubleshoot performance anomalies in the underlying infrastructure such as resource saturation or unexpected spikes that can prevent EKS Anywhere from scheduling and running workload pods as requested.

Monitoring EKS Anywhere Internals

Every Kubernetes cluster consists of one or more worker nodes where containerized applications get deployed and the control plane, which is responsible for the management of the worker nodes. The control plane makes scheduling decisions such as which pod is deployed to which worker node, monitors the cluster and manages the desired state of the Kubernetes cluster.

Splunk provides out-of-the-box telemetry for Kubernetes internals, including components that make up the control plane, as well as those running on the worker nodes in addition to key add-ons. Monitoring these components enables rapid troubleshooting of issues related to scheduling, orchestration and networking of Kubernetes clusters:

• Control plane components: The API server, the etcd distributed persistent storage, the scheduler, the controller manager.
• Components on the data plane: The Kubernetes service proxy, the Kubelet, the container runtime, network and storage interfaces.
• Add-ons: Kubernetes DNS server
   

Kubernetes is a distributed system, and all the components mentioned above communicate only with the API server, which orchestrates various lifecycle events for deployed applications. Kubernetes clusters consist of persistent entities called Kubernetes Objects which represent the state of Kubernetes clusters. These objects include:

• Containerized applications that are deployed on the cluster and associated nodes
• The resources available to those applications
   

The policies around how those applications behave such as restart policies, upgrades and fault-tolerance:

• Add-ons for service discovery
   

Get Started with Monitoring Amazon EKS Anywhere 

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides comprehensive Kubernetes monitoring in all environments, including AWS-managed Kubernetes — Amazon EKS as well as on-premises self-managed Amazon EKS Anywhere deployments. 

Sign up for a free trial of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring to get started with end-to-end Kubernetes monitoring.

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Thanks!
Amit Sharma