Monitoring a Microservice on Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

Microservices architecture has changed how we design and manage large-scale applications, breaking them down into small, autonomous services that communicate through APIs. This architectural style offers significant advantages in terms of scalability, flexibility, and fault isolation, allowing organizations to innovate and deploy updates more rapidly. However, the distributed nature of microservices introduces complexity, making monitoring crucial to ensure these systems remain reliable and performant.

Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, making it an ideal choice for running microservices. To achieve comprehensive observability, we leverage OpenTelemetry, an open-source framework that provides standardized tools for tracing, metrics, and logging. Prometheus, another open-source tool, excels in monitoring and alerting, offering a powerful solution for collecting and querying time-series data. Together, OpenTelemetry and Prometheus provide a robust monitoring stack for Kubernetes-based microservices, enabling quick detection and resolution of issues and providing deep insights into system performance.

Transcript

1. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Monitoring a Microservice on Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
2. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 • OSS Contributor at Flanksource, Ansible and CHAOSS Project. • Developer Advocate/Experience Engineer at Resilis. • Technical Author and Speaker. About Me Desmond Obisi (He/Him)
3. Agenda 1. Introduction and Definition of Terms 2. Architecture Deep Dive 3. Demo 4. Q&A 2024
4. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Microservices architecture has revolutionized how we design and manage large-scale applications, breaking them down into small, autonomous services that communicate through APIs. This architectural style offers significant advantages in terms of scalability, flexibility, and fault isolation, allowing organizations to innovate and deploy updates more rapidly. However, the distributed nature of microservices introduces complexity, making monitoring crucial to ensure these systems remain reliable and performant. Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, making it an ideal choice for running microservices. To achieve comprehensive observability, we leverage OpenTelemetry, an open-source framework that provides standardized tools for tracing, metrics, and logging. Prometheus, another open-source tool, excels in monitoring and alerting, offering a powerful solution for collecting and querying time-series data. Together, OpenTelemetry and Prometheus provide a robust monitoring stack for Kubernetes-based microservices, enabling quick detection and resolution of issues and providing deep insights into system performance. Introduction
5. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Kubernetes: An open-source platform developed by Google for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. Key Features: • Container Orchestration: Automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers. • Automatic Scaling: Automatically scales applications up or down based on traffic and resource usage. • Service Discovery and Load Balancing: Automatically discovers services and balances the load between them. • Self-Healing: Automatically replaces and reschedules containers that fail, and kills containers that don’t respond to user-defined health checks. What is Kubernetes?
6. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Microservices: An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, loosely coupled, and independently deployable services. Benefits: • Scalability: Each microservice can be scaled independently based on demand. • Flexibility: Allows for the use of different technologies and languages for different services. • Improved Fault Isolation: A failure in one service does not necessarily affect others, improving the overall resilience of the system. • Continuous Deployment: Services can be deployed independently, allowing for more frequent and reliable updates. Understanding Microservices
7. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Challenges: • Distributed Nature of Microservices: Microservices are spread across multiple nodes and services, making it challenging to track their interactions and dependencies. • Complex Interactions: Services communicate over the network, introducing latency and potential points of failure that can be hard to diagnose. Goals of Monitoring: • Ensure Reliability and Performance: Monitoring helps maintain system uptime and ensures services are performing optimally. • Detect and Resolve Issues Quickly: Enables quick identification and resolution of performance bottlenecks and failures. • Gain Insights into System Behavior: Provides visibility into how services interact, helping to optimize and improve the architecture. The Need for Monitoring
8. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework designed for cloud-native software, providing standardized tools for collecting and exporting telemetry data. Core Components: • Tracing: Captures end-to-end details of requests as they move through microservices, identifying latency issues and bottlenecks. • Metrics: Collects quantitative data over time (e.g., CPU usage, memory usage, request rates) to monitor performance and health. • Logging: Will provide detailed logs of application events and errors, giving context and insights into system behavior. Supporting Components: • Instrumentation Libraries: Pre-built libraries for various languages to simplify the process of instrumenting applications for tracing and metrics collection. • Collectors: Agents that collect telemetry data from multiple sources, process it, and export it to various backends for analysis. • Context Propagation: Mechanisms to propagate context (like trace IDs) across service boundaries, ensuring continuity in distributed tracing. Introduction to OpenTelemetry
9. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 OpenTelemetry consists of vendor-neutral open source tools, APIs, and SDKs that can be implemented with a variety of programming languages, including Go, Java, and Python. These tools work together to specify what needs to be measured, gather the relevant data, clean and organize the information, and export it in the appropriate formats to a monitoring backend. OpenTelemetry’s components are loosely coupled, so you can easily pick and choose which parts of OTel you want to integrate. Key Features: • Vendor-Agnostic: OpenTelemetry supports multiple backends, allowing you to choose your preferred monitoring and analysis tools without vendor lock-in. • Multi-Language and Platform Support: It offers SDKs for various programming languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, JavaScript) and supports different platforms, ensuring wide applicability. • Integrates with Various Backends: OpenTelemetry can export data to multiple observability platforms, such as Prometheus, Jaeger, and Zipkin. • Standardizes Observability: Provides a consistent way to collect telemetry data across services, improving interoperability and simplifying instrumentation. Key Features of OpenTelemetry
10. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 OpenTelemetry Architecture Microservice
11. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 What is Prometheus? Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally developed by SoundCloud. It is designed for reliability and scalability, particularly for dynamic cloud environments. Key Features: • Multi-Dimensional Data Model:Uses key-value pairs to identify time series, providing flexible and powerful querying capabilities. • PromQL (Prometheus Query Language): A powerful query language to aggregate and analyze time-series data. • Time Series Data Collection: Continuously collects metrics data, storing it with a timestamp. • Alerting: Supports rule-based alerting to notify about potential issues. • Visualization: Integrates with tools like Grafana for creating dashboards and visualizing metrics. • Client Libraries: Client libraries allow easy instrumentation of services. Over ten languages are supported already and custom libraries are easy to implement. Introduction to Prometheus
12. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Components: • Prometheus Server: Scrapes and stores time-series data. • Pushgateway: Facilitates the push of metrics from short-lived jobs. • Exporters: Collects metrics from services and exposes them in a format Prometheus can scrape. • Alertmanager: Handles alerts generated by Prometheus server, managing notifications and silencing rules. • Grafana: A popular open-source platform for monitoring and observability, used to visualize Prometheus data through rich, interactive dashboards. Workflow: • Data Collection: Prometheus server scrapes metrics from instrumented services and exporters at regular intervals. • Data Storage: Time-series data is stored in Prometheus' internal database. • Alerting: Prometheus evaluates rules and triggers alerts when conditions are met. • Visualization: Grafana queries Prometheus to display metrics on dashboards. Architecture of Prometheus
13. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Prometheus Architecture with K8s
14. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 OpenTelemetry provides a standardized way to instrument applications for tracing and metrics. Prometheus excels in collecting, storing, and querying metrics data. Integration Steps: • Instrument Microservices: Use OpenTelemetry libraries to instrument your microservices for collecting traces and metrics. • Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector: Set up the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive telemetry data from services and export it to Prometheus. • Configure Prometheus: Set up Prometheus to scrape metrics from the OpenTelemetry Collector. • Visualize Data: Use Grafana to create dashboards and visualize the metrics collected by Prometheus. Benefits: • Enhanced Observability: Combining tracing and metrics provides a comprehensive view of system performance and health. • Scalability: Both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are designed to scale with your infrastructure. • Flexibility: Vendor-agnostic tools allow integration with various backends and visualization platforms. Integrating OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
15. Demo Time 2024
16. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Comprehensive Insights: • Holistic Observability: Combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus provides detailed visibility into both metrics and traces, offering a complete picture of system performance. • Improved Diagnostics: Traces help in pinpointing latency issues and understanding request flow, while metrics provide quantitative data for monitoring service health. Quick Detection and Resolution of Issues: • Real-Time Monitoring: Prometheus continuously scrapes metrics, enabling real-time alerting and rapid issue detection. • Enhanced Troubleshooting: OpenTelemetry’s tracing capabilities help in quickly identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks. Scalability and Flexibility: • Scalable Solutions: Both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are designed to scale with growing infrastructure, ensuring they can handle increased load and complexity. • Vendor-Agnostic: The use of open-source, vendor-neutral tools avoids lock-in and allows for integration with various platforms and backends. Community-Driven and Open-Source: • Active Communities: Both projects are backed by vibrant open-source communities, ensuring ongoing improvements, support, and a wealth of shared knowledge and resources. • Cost-Effective: Leveraging open-source tools can significantly reduce monitoring costs compared to proprietary solutions. Benefits of this Monitoring Stack
17. DevOpsDays Nairobi 2024 Recap of Key Points: • Importance of Monitoring: Effective monitoring is crucial for ensuring the reliability, performance, and health of microservices. • Role of Kubernetes: Kubernetes provides a robust platform for managing containerized microservices, enhancing their scalability and resilience. • OpenTelemetry and Prometheus: These tools together offer a comprehensive observability solution, integrating tracing and metrics to provide deep insights and real-time monitoring. Future of Observability: • Evolving Standards: OpenTelemetry is continuously evolving to include logging and other features, aiming to become a one-stop solution for observability. • Adoption Trends: The adoption of these open-source tools is growing, driven by their flexibility, scalability, and the support of active communities. Best Practices: • Instrument Early: Start instrumenting your microservices with OpenTelemetry early in the development process to ensure comprehensive coverage. • Use Labels and Tags Wisely: Apply consistent labeling and tagging to your metrics and traces to make filtering and querying easier. • Set Up Alerts: Define meaningful alerting rules in Prometheus to proactively address potential issues before they impact users. • Leverage Dashboards: Use Grafana to create informative dashboards that provide actionable insights into system performance and health. • Regularly Review and Refine: Continuously review and refine your monitoring setup to adapt to changing requirements and to incorporate new best practices and features. Conclusion
18. Q/A 2024