Is Kubernetes Monitoring Flawed? - OpenObservability Talks S3E08

A 3-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40k active series by default! Do we really need all that data? The current state of Kubernetes open source monitoring is in need of improvement. High churn rate of pod metrics, proliferation of metrics with low usage, and configuration complexity are some of the issues that need to be addressed.

I discussed this topic with Aliaksandr Valialkin, CTO at VictoriaMetrics and creator of the open source project. We discussed the common problems, as well as directions and best practices to overcome some of these complexities as individuals and as a community. We also discussed VictoriaMetrics open source project and how it addresses some of these challenges.

Aliaksandr a Golang engineer, who likes writing simple and performant code and creating easy-to-use programs. Sometimes these hard-to-match requirements work together, like in the VictoriaMetrics case.

The episode was live-streamed on 24 January 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/Z-58C8HFGb8

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Show Notes:

• monitoring microservice system, app and communications
• high churn rate for pod metrics
• Kubernetes produces too many metrics by defaults, most of which are unused
• recommended listing of metrics
• removing unused metric labels to reduce cardinality
• Prometheus native (exponential buckets) historgrams
• Configuration complexity with multiple deployments
• OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics open specifications
• collecting system metrics and application metrics uniformly
• VictoriaMetrics essentials
• VictoriaMetrics extensions beyond Prometheus
• a full stack monitoring collection, analysis and alerting
• how to join the VictoriaMetrics community
• industry update: 2023 cloud native predictions post by CNCF CTO

Resources:

• Why Prometheus cannot query remote storage in an expected way via remote_read protocol - https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/4456 
• VictoriaMetrics scaling to 100 million metrics per second https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfed9_Q0_qU
• https://victoriametrics.com/
• https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics
• https://docs.victoriametrics.com/#community-and-contributions

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Dotan Horovits 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/  

Aliaksandr Valialkin

Twitter: https://twitter.com/valyala
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valyala/