Grafana Labs Extends Observability Reach Deeper into Kubernetes
Grafana Labs has extended the reach of a Fleet Management platform for centralizing the management of telemetry data collectors to add support for Kubernetes environments.
In addition, an update to Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart 2.0 now makes it possible to collect telemetry data using Grafana Alloy, an open-source data collector, and open-source tools such as Node Exporter, OpenCost and Kepler. IT teams can now also send telemetry data to multiple destinations and there are also now built-in integrations with the core Grafana platform as well as cert-manager, MySQL databases, and Fleet Manager.
The Grafana Cloud Kubernetes Monitoring tool, meanwhile, now provides a storage monitoring capability to track persistent volume capacity over time, understand storage classes at a glance, identify persistent volume claim status and pending volumes and consumption of storage resources down to the pod level.
Finally, an enhanced search function enables IT teams to instantly locate comprehensive, contextual details for any Kubernetes cluster, node, namespace, workload, pod or container.
Fleet Management provides a centralized control plane for managing the collection of telemetry data that is generated in much higher volumes in cloud-native computing environments.
Grafana Labs CTO Tom Wilkie said that as IT environments become more complex, there is a growing need to streamline the collection of telemetry data in a way that organizations can afford. A schema-less approach based on open source tools such as Prometheus monitoring software and OpenTelemetry agent software achieves that goal because it eliminates the need to curate and store telemetry data, he added.
In fact, adoption of Prometheus and OpenTelemetry is already widespread. A Grafana Labs survey finds 76% of respondents now using open-source software tools and platforms such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, with 70% using both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry in some capacity. Half are working for organizations that increased their investments in both technologies for the second year in a row.
More than two-thirds of respondents (67%) said their organization uses Prometheus to monitor applications in production environments, while OpenTelemetry is being used by 41% of respondents to collect telemetry data. More than a third (38%) of respondents are investigating OpenTelemetry, with 6% reporting they have no plans to use it at all.
Overall, the types of telemetry data being collected span metrics (95%), logs (87%), traces (57% and profiles (16%), with organizations on average relying on eight different technologies to collect this data. The most important factors when evaluating observability tools and platforms are cost (75%), followed by ease of use (58%), while the biggest concerns cited are complexity (37%), signal-to-noise ratio (38%) and costs (37%).
There’s little doubt that adoption of Kubernetes is spurring increased usage of Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. All three projects are being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and there is a significant amount of cross-pollination between the maintainers of each of these projects.
The challenge, as always, is determining what telemetry data to simply delete versus cost-effectively store to address any potential future analytics, security and compliance requirements. Not surprisingly, many organizations in the interest of being safe now versus sorry later, are storing more telemetry data than they absolutely need.
