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How to monitor your Kubernetes Kapsule cluster with Cockpit

Reviewed on 12 August 2024Published on 24 July 2023

Scaleway’s observability Cockpit provides automated monitoring of your Kubernetes cluster. As Kubernetes environments grow in complexity, monitoring becomes crucial for optimal performance. Visualization of the clusters’ metrics is available in a hosted Grafana.

Grafana’s rich visualizations and ease of use make it an ideal choice. Cockpit offers a hassle-free solution, providing real-time insights without extra infrastructure.

Cockpit empowers you to monitor the clusters’ control plane, nodes, managed resources and the cluster system applications.

  • Detect incidents and diagnose failures in the earliest stages
  • Get new insights on control plane and worker nodes usage such as CPU and memory to optimize your resource allocation
  • Achieve a better understanding of your infrastructure by analyzing data on your API server, system applications and up/down scaling behavior
Important

Control plane monitoring: Scaleway Kapsule natively provides monitoring for the control plane, free of charge. Additionally, monitoring of the data plane is possible. To monitor the data plane, refer to How to monitor your Kubernetes Kapsule data plane with Cockpit. For detailed observability, refer to the documentation on how to send logs from your Kubernetes cluster to your Cockpit.

Control plane vs. data plane: The control plane is responsible for managing the Kubernetes cluster’s state and orchestrating workloads, while the data plane consists of the nodes that execute the workloads.

Security and compliance: For enhanced security and compliance, Kapsule provides audit logs natively within Cockpit. Learn more in the audit logs documentation.

Before you startLink to this anchor

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

  • A Scaleway account logged into the console
  • Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
  • Created a Kubernetes Kapsule cluster
  • Created a Grafana user for Cockpit

How to access your Cockpit Grafana dashboardLink to this anchor

Important

Cockpit’s default retention duration is 31 days for metrics and 7 days for logs. Find out how to change your data retention period.

  1. Open your Cockpit in the Scaleway console.
  2. Click Visualize Scaleway data. The Grafana interface opens in a new browser tab.
  3. Log into Grafana using your Grafana credentials. The list of your Cockpit dashboards displays.
  4. Click Kubernetes cluster overview in the list of dashboards. A status overview of your cluster displays. This dashboard allows you to monitor multiple components of your Kubernetes cluster: control-plane, nodes, managed resources and cluster system applications.
    Tip

    Select the cluster you want to display from the drop-down list at the top of the page to change the currently displayed cluster.

Monitoring of the kube-apiserverLink to this anchor

The cluster overview dashboard offers real-time monitoring capabilities for the kube-apiserver within your Kubernetes cluster. Serving as a crucial component on the control plane, the kube-apiserver acts as the gateway to the Kubernetes API, allowing you to interact with the cluster.

Large clusters with numerous resources (nodes, pods, and custom resources (CRDs)) and high controller requests (e.g. argocd and velero) can cause CPU and memory spikes, leading to sluggish or unresponsive API server performance. You may also encounter errors like "EOF" when using kubectl.

To address this potential issue, it is crucial to monitor the CPU and RAM consumption of the apiserver closely. By doing so, you can proactively manage and reduce the load on the apiserver, thus averting performance bottlenecks.

For scenarios where you require consistent and predictable performance, along with dedicated resources for the apiserver, consider migrating it to a dedicated control plane to ensure optimal performance and stability.

How to view the Kubernetes control plane logsLink to this anchor

  1. Open your Cockpit in the Scaleway console.
  2. Click Visualize Scaleway data. The Grafana interface opens in a new browser tab.
  3. Log into Grafana using your Grafana credentials. The list of your Cockpit dashboards displays.
  4. Click Kubernetes cluster logs in the list of dashboards. A listing of your control plane logs displays. This dashboard allows you to view the logs of multiple components of your Kubernetes cluster, such as the controller-manager, ccm, kapsule-autoscaler, and more.
    Note

    Currently, no logs from the kube-apiserver are sent to your Cockpit.

    Tip

    Select the cluster you want to display from the drop-down list at the top of the page to change the currently displayed cluster.

See also
How to enable the Easy Deploy featureHow to monitor a cluster's data plane with Cockpit
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