Monitoring, metrics, and visualization

In this section, we will learn about popular monitoring solutions in the cloud-native ecosystem and how to get a monitoring stack quickly up and running. Monitoring, logging, and tracing are often misused as interchangeable tools; therefore, understanding each tool's purpose is extremely important.

The most recent 2020 Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey suggests that companies use multiple tools (on average five or more) to monitor their cloud-native services. The list of the popular tools and projects includes Prometheus, OpenMetrics, Datadog, Grafana, Splunk, Sentry, CloudWatch, Lightstep, StatsD, Jaeger, Thanos, OpenTelemetry, and Kiali. Studies suggest that the most common and adopted tools are open source. You can read more about the CNCF community radar observations at https://radar.cncf.io/2020-09-observability.

Prometheus and Grafana used together is the most relevant combined solution for Kubernetes workloads...