Improve Kubernetes operational intelligence with multi cluster observability

[weaveworks]

WKP 2.5 empowers any Kubernetes with observability and control for maximum operational efficiency across clouds.

With Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP) 2.5 we are adding an enterprise grade observability portal. WKP uses standard Kubernetes tooling, and works across organizations and different environments (Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Pivotal PKS, Red Hat OpenShift, open-source Kubernetes and VMware Tanzu). Observability is the cornerstone of efficient and secure Day 2 operations, by providing critical data on health and system performance to cluster operators, SREs and developers reducing defect discovery time, and improving Mean Time To Response (MTTR).

This point release is expanding operational intelligence for cluster operators through observability capabilities that increase performance, stability, and resiliency of applications, Kubernetes components, and underlying infrastructure.

What’s new in WKP 2.5?

• Advanced observability and monitoring with action oriented GitOps dashboards for
  • Cluster Health
  • System Performance
• Full-stack troubleshooting
• SSO integration
• Enhanced EKS support

With a zero-configuration installation, WKP allows cluster operators to attach and control observability components to any Kubernetes cluster (AKS, EKS, GKE, OpenShift, Tanzu or self hosted) and gain instant full-stack understandings. 2.5 introduces a single pane of glass, operational dashboard and observability layer across your entire fleet of Kubernetes clusters and workloads with full SSO integration.

Developers, SREs, and Kubernetes platform operators get accelerated time to value with automated and unified comprehensive insights into the health, state, and performance of their application, infrastructure and multi-cloud environments.

Out of the box set of standard metrics, logs and alerts turn data into insights and enables proactive incident management, prevention and optimization of the performance of their modern applications rapidly. Smart aggregation of alerts across cluster fleets decrease cognitive overload, avoid alert fatigue and increase true observability of the system.

Action-oriented GitOps dashboards for Cluster Health and System Performance

Gain global visibility across clusters, teams and environment with focused and action-oriented GitOps dashboards. Staying on top of all Kubernetes health metrics and threshold alerting is crucial to ensure early detection, prevention, and timely diagnosis of issues. The overall health of the cluster is an aggregation of health of the components and nodes provided through Prometheus metrics and alert manager.

WKP 2.5 visualizes the following:

• Core Kubernetes metrics (CPU, memory, network, storage, uptime, restarts)
• Host level metrics
• Prometheus endpoint data from the API Server, NGINX and etcd
• Prometheus alerts and cluster events

The standard working set of health checks and performance metrics is being applied to the entire cluster fleet and integrates with leading alert management tools.

Comprehensive debugging and root cause analysis

With WKP 2.5, SREs and platform operators can guarantee continuous running, and hit SLAs even at high scale pipeline throughput. GitOps cluster management already improves the security and auditing of operations by enforcing a “pull request” where every change to a cluster is authorized and logged. The GitOps audit trail not only accelerates troubleshooting but also simplifies guided root cause analysis across all levels. Kubernetes cluster events quickly uncover any performance issues in the delivery pipeline before service interruptions occur.

Enhanced Security and Compliance with SSO

WKP 2.5 enhances Kubernetes security by shifting it left with Single Sign-On (SSO). While focusing on prevention, SSO improves security, compliance and productivity since it gives end-users a simplified, single click method for accessing compute infrastructure and operators a centralized user directory. Platform operators can now enforce compliance rules and policies while choosing from a variety of SSO providers such as OpenID Connect (OIDC), Dex, Microsoft Active Directory.

Enhanced EKS cluster support

WKP now enables you to leverage the full suite of configuration capabilities of eksctl Giving you the flexibility to configure specific VPCs and subnets for use with your WKP created EKS clusters.

Read the release notes and contact us for a demo to see the new features in action.

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