Tools

Prometheus is a free software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It records real-time metrics in a time series database (allowing for high dimensionality) built using a HTTP pull model, with flexible queries and real-time alerting.

Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. A licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional capabilities is also available as a self-hosted installation or an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service. It is expandable through a plug-in system. End users can create complex monitoring dashboards using interactive query builders.

When running multiple services and applications on a Kubernetes cluster, a centralized, cluster-level logging stack can help you quickly sort through and analyze the heavy volume of log data produced by your Pods. One popular centralized logging solution is the Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK) stack.

Elasticsearch is a real-time, distributed, and scalable search engine which allows for full-text and structured search, as well as analytics. It is commonly used to index and search through large volumes of log data, but can also be used to search many different kinds of documents.

Elasticsearch is commonly deployed alongside Kibana, a powerful data visualization frontend and dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana allows you to explore your Elasticsearch log data through a web interface, and build dashboards and queries to quickly answer questions and gain insight into your Kubernetes applications.

Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.

Application definitions, configurations, and environments should be declarative and version controlled. Application deployment and lifecycle management should be automated, auditable, and easy to understand.

The base Axual installation will install a single Maria DB database. Most companies will have their own in house databases that can be used. The standard installation does not include a multi cluster failover safe database. (Note the the database is used for the Stand Alone client and is not used by consumer and producer clients.)

Node Exporter is a Prometheus exporter for server level and OS level metrics with configurable metric collectors. It helps in measuring various server resources such as RAM, disk space, and CPU utilization.

View and explore data in the management database.

Cruise Control is a product that helps run Apache Kafka clusters at large scale.

Please install Cruise Control with the Axual Operator/Strimzi .

Kafka Lag Exporter makes it easy to view the latency (residence time) of your Apache Kafka consumer groups. It can run anywhere, but it provides features to run easily on Kubernetes clusters against Strimzi Kafka clusters using the Prometheus and Grafana monitoring stack. Kafka Lag Exporter is an Akka Typed application written in Scala.

For more information about Kafka Lag Exporter’s features see Lightbend’s blog post: Monitor Kafka Consumer Group Latency with Kafka Lag Exporter.

Used mostly for the Connect Application. Visual VM can be used to view JMX debugging information for a Connect Application.

The administrative client for Kafka, which supports managing and inspecting topics, brokers, configurations, log levels and ACLs. The KafkaAdminClient is a programming interface with the Kafka Brokers.