Red Hat OpenShift Observability Brings Flexible Insights to Management of Clusters

Observability is now table stakes functionality for many organizations deploying their applications across various types of IT infrastructure. If you’re on an IT operations team, you’re probably constantly striving towards the ideal single pane of glass that monitors your entire hybrid cloud to help you gain the visibility you need to help simplify the day-to-day management of your entire architecture. With Red Hat OpenShift’s observability capabilities, that single pane of glass is available to your hybrid cloud environments, both on prem and in the public cloud. You can discover, analyze, and remediate any potential issues faster from a single place - the Red Hat OpenShift console.

New observability capabilities in the Red Hat OpenShift console with version 4.10

We recently released OpenShift 4.10. We included some new observability capabilities in that release, including:

• Improved OpenShift Monitoring UI Experience with new Unified & Integrated Metrics that no longer require management of 3rd party UI’s through a separate user interface.  It also includes integrated alerting with Alert manager, to simplify end-to-end monitoring while benefiting from Red Hat support.
• Updated OpenShift Audit Logging for Metrics which now includes support for enabling Audit Logging in the Prometheus adapter. This provides the ability to observe which component are requesting and calling the metrics API, and enables customers to monitor and troubleshoot performance problems via the API audit capability.

• Enable Query Logging in all Prometheus Instances providing platform monitoring & user workload monitoring. This uses ThanosQuerier to see which query is frequently executed and shows the impact to operations.
• Client Certificate Authentication for Scraping Metics enabling Prometheus to use Client Authentication for scraping metrics to:
• Reduce performance impacts on authentication APIs.
• Provide consistency with Global OpenShift Security Configurations.
• Authenticate using TLS certificates instead of bearer tokens when scraping metrics.

Overview of the OpenShift Console Turnkey Observability Experience

Customers managing their on-premise workloads can utilize the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Console to observe and manage their workloads, and to triage any potential problems within their OpenShift environment. OpenShift Dashboards visualize the monitoring of APIs, users and workloads, and can accurately track the health of containers, pods and namespaces all the way down into the infrastructure tier of the OpenShift clusters. The Red Hat Open API framework enables our customers to use a variety of the visualization tools they desire to customize their OpenShift management experience. The OpenShift Container Platform Console allows for establishing dashboards, set alert manager rules and establish remediation best practices in addition to the OpenShift Console with tools like EKS, Grafana, Splunk, STS Cloudwatch, and more.

Administrators and SREs can access these capabilities in the OpenShift Container Platform Console by choosing Observe > Dashboards in the UI.

Administrators, Developers and SREs can explore API and Cluster Level Requests in Dashboards or via the Open API framework to measure and rebalance workloads across the OpenShift Clusters. The Red Hat OpenShift Console provides SREs and Developers with the ability to identify root cause analysis and examine long runtimes and resources.

It also provides the easiest way to determine the requests in-flight, and the response bytes per second per container, pod and namespace instance. OpenShift provides the ability to run metrics queries on demand, providing great flexibility to identify KubeState and Pod metrics at any time to verify the health status of each running process.

Identify the Health State of Running Services/Requests

Alerting on telemetry metrics

OpenShift Console offers alerting with Alert Manager Integration instead of requiring  separate tool sets to identify alerting rules and firing mechanisms. The ability to define and monitor alerting rules and respond to alerts is centrally managed for OpenShift Clusters in the OCP Console per the example below.

Accessing Telemetry Services

The OpenShift Console for In-Cluster management and the Hybrid Cloud Console for OpenShift Dedicated, AWS and Azure offers a consistent tool set of Open Telemetry Services, APIs, Community and Red Hat supported Operators for you to use telemetry capabilities.

Through your cloud-based hybrid console or in-cluster console experience, Operator Hub enables Red Hat customers and Open Source communities to connect to the ecosystem of Operators from the Kubernetes community and Red Hat Partners. Red Hat supports both community and Red Hat supported Operators in Operator Hub. There’s a convenient “Monitoring” category for you to find telemetry based services available to you.

Our Open API Framework

We create strong relationships with our ecosystem of technology partners, providing Telemetry services across a wide range of capabilities.We work with Telemetry services include Grafana Loki & Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Kafka, OpenTelemetry, Fluentbit, Splunk, AWS CloudWatch, Google Stackdriver, and Vector and Fluentd collectors With Red Hat and our ecosystem, users are able to access several monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing capabilities as well as OpenTelemetry APIs through the OpenShift console and a wide range of flexible visualization platforms including Grafana, Kilbana, OpenShift Console, and many other Northbound systems that can consume OpenShift’s Open API Framework.

Our observability capabilities also include support for Elasticsearch and fluentd, Kafka, Loki and Vector, as well as monitoring with Prometheus for OpenShift across the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud. 

To learn more about these features, please visit (Cloud.RedHat.com) offers the Hybrid Console and Marketplace for Open APIs, Microservices, and Operator Hub to manage your Hybrid Observability Stack.

Red Hat provides customers the flexibility of using OpenShift Console visualization or command line based API tool sets to observe and manage their workloads and infrastructure, using an open API framework. Red Hat continues to innovate and lead with OpenShift across the private and public cloud in partnership with Open Source communities to provide substantial value and contributions to build the Open Hybrid Observability Cloud of the future. And this is what we, at Red Hat, are driving to provide - an end to end open observability experience for on-premises, hybrid architectures, and fully managed cloud infrastructure spanning a variety of workloads. We do this by providing an Open Hybrid Observability management experience that begins with the OpenShift Console.

• Red Hat OpenShift API Management
• GitHub OpenShift Cluster Logging Operator + APIs
• GitHub OpenShift Cluster Monitoring Operator + APIs: