Observability Strategies with Amazon EKS
Introduction to Observability
- Observability is crucial for detecting, investigating, and remediating issues in your clusters
- It provides deeper insights into your clusters, allowing you to improve performance and fix problems
- The three pillars of observability are logs, metrics, and traces
Challenges and Approaches
- Onboarding can be a barrier, as you need to decide how to gather and integrate the observability data
- Choosing the right metrics to collect is important, as you don't want to collect everything
- Analyzing the impact of the data and determining the right approach to do so is key
AWS Observability Tools
AWS provides several options for observability:
- Managed Open-Source Approach: Tools like Prometheus and Grafana
- Amazon OpenSearch Service: Centralized storage and analysis of logs, metrics, and traces
- AWS Cloud-Native Services: Focused on CloudWatch and related tools like Container Insights and Application Signals
Collecting Metrics and Traces
- The CloudWatch agent has been improved to collect logs, metrics, and traces using a single sidecar
- This simplifies the deployment process and is also compatible with OpenTelemetry
CloudWatch Logs Insights
- CloudWatch Logs Insights provides powerful log analysis capabilities
- It allows you to filter, search, and identify patterns in your logs
- The visual representation of log activity can help you quickly identify anomalies
Container Insights
- Container Insights provides in-depth insights into your EKS clusters
- It offers a high-level overview of cluster health and performance
- You can drill down to the individual pod and service level to identify issues
Application Signals
- Application Signals takes a more application-centric approach to observability
- It focuses on key application metrics like volume, availability, latency, and error rates
- You can trace issues down to specific methods or components within your application
Demonstration
The demonstration showcases the following features:
- Cluster-level overview in Container Insights
- Drilling down to specific cluster alarms and metrics
- Exploring application-level insights with Application Signals
- Investigating logs using CloudWatch Logs Insights
Key Takeaways
- AWS provides a variety of observability tools and approaches, including managed open-source, centralized, and cloud-native services
- The CloudWatch agent simplifies the collection of logs, metrics, and traces
- CloudWatch Logs Insights, Container Insights, and Application Signals offer powerful insights and analysis capabilities
- The observability tools are designed to work seamlessly together, enabling you to navigate between metrics, logs, and traces