Monitoring applications on Kubernetes-based environments can be challenging. This presentation shows how to implement a sample monitoring stack for SAS® ESP on Viya 4 to provide ways to quickly identify problems due to abnormal use of system resources and take action before performance for the overall system is significantly impacted. The monitoring technique described hereby does not represent a one-size-fits-all type of solution as we understand that no two environments are the same. Instead, it wants to be a foundation to build on as far as what resources to monitor and how to monitor them using open-source monitoring and alerting tools.
The main components of the monitoring stack, Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, are highlighted in this presentation:
- Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It has been adopted by many companies and organizations, and it is widely considered to be the de-facto monitoring solution for Kubernetes environments. Prometheus has a very active developer and user community, and, as a project, has been a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016. For reference, it was the second hosted project to join the foundation, after Kubernetes.
- Grafana is an open source visualization and analytics software that allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore metrics regardless of where they are stored. More simply, it gives you the ability to turn your time-series database data into beautiful graphs and visualizations.
- Loki is a Prometheus-inspired, horizontally-scalable, highly-available, log aggregation system. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate.
Unless your organization is already using Prometheus and Grafana, you are left wondering about the effort to install them on your environment. The good news is that they are actually shipped with SAS® Viya 4, and can be easily added to your system as part of the installation process or later on if you choose to do so. SAS® is among the vast majority of companies that have opted to make Prometheus and Grafana part of their standard monitoring tools for Kubernetes-based environments. As of the release of this presentation, you are still required to install the Grafana dashboards for SAS® ESP as well as install and configure Loki if you want to take advantage of the monitoring capabilities offered by the sample dashboards that come with the monitoring stack.
More details on the installation and configuration of the monitoring stack components can be found at https://github.com/sassoftware/iot-kubernetes-monitoring-esp. Access to the GitHub page for the project is also possible through the sample Grafana dashboards.
Be sure to check the Sample Monitoring stack for SAS® ESP on Viya 4 Sample Monitoring stack for SAS® ESP on Viya 4 video for a more detailed introduction to this new functionality. Contact Mauro Cazzari for questions and more information.
