Managing Kubernetes infrastructure is complex enough when things are operating optimally. When incidents occur, you need to identify and address the root cause as quickly as possible. With traditional log aggregation tools, you are left to manually search and filter your logs, hoping to find the message that proves useful. Considering the volume of logs generated by modern architectures, this approach is hardly efficient.
We are excited to announce a public beta of our Kubernetes logging solution, a new capability for our Enterprise Observability platform. By combining application and container logs from your Kubernetes pods with the context that Instana already has about your applications, we can quickly surface meaningful log messages to aid in incident recovery.
Managing Kubernetes
Kubernetes can facilitate the automated management of containerized services and workloads. Whether relying on automated processes, playbooks, or manual troubleshooting, logs from our Kubernetes-managed applications and services are vital in our ability to remediate issues.
“Kubernetes does not provide a native storage solution for log data. Instead, there are many logging solutions that integrate with Kubernetes.” – kubernetes.io
The lack of a built-in log aggregation infrastructure means we need a solution for ingesting, storing, and analyzing our various logs. The most common log sources are the application runtimes running inside the container and the standard output streams of the containers themselves.
Instana for Enterprise Observability
Instana’s automatic Kubernetes Monitoring provides visibility across the complete orchestration stack, from Kubernetes infrastructure to K8S pods and nodes. Instana combines automatic service discovery, automatic tracing, and an unprecedented level of granularity (1 second) to provide you with complete observability of your Kubernetes clusters.
Introducing our Kubernetes Logging Public Beta
To enable our new Kubernetes Logging functionality, we begin by ingesting application and container logs in an Open Telemetry-compatible format. The Instana agent is able to collect logs from the following sources:
- Warning errors generated by runtimes instrumented with the Instana AutoTracer
- The stdout and stderr of any Docker containers
- Exceptions arising in application runtimes
Read More: Docker vs Kubernetes
For basic log navigation, logs can be grouped and filtered using any of the metadata available, which includes, for example, Cluster Name, Namespaces, Pod names and Workloads from Kubernetes. Logs are presented with all available platform context and links allow easy navigation to details about the related service and host.
Of course, you can also navigate from any host or service page to the logs view with prepopulated filters. When combined with Instana’s persistent timeline settings, these features enable seamless navigation on your troubleshooting journey.
Sign up for a free trial to try it today
If you’d like to see how this additional logging metadata can help you, then sign up for a free 14-day trial of Instana and take it for a spin inside your own application.
