Collecting metrics with Kubernetes

If you have some experience with Kubernetes, you may be familiar with cAdvisor and Heapster. cAdvisor was integrated into the kube-proxy until Kubernetes 1.12 and then it was removed. Heapster was removed in Kubernetes 1.13. If you wish, you can install them, but they are not recommended anymore as there are much better solutions now.

One caveat is that the Kubernetes dashboard v1 still depends on Heapster. The Kubernetes dashboard v2 is still in Beta at the time of writing. Hopefully, it will be generally available by the time you read this.

Kubernetes now has a Metrics API. It supports node and pod metrics out of the box. You can also define your own custom metrics.

A metric contains a timestamp, a usage field, and the time range the metric was collected (many metrics are accumulated over a time period). Here is the API definition for node metrics:

type NodeMetrics struct {
    metav1.TypeMeta
    metav1.ObjectMeta
    Timestamp...