Monitoring Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) resources with Azure Monitor
In the prior article, I talked about monitoring AKS via Grafana dashboards. There’s also another way to monitor AKS resources with Azure Monitor. This feature is directly integrated in Azure Portal. Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of your container workloads deployed to:
- Managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Self-managed Kubernetes cluster
- Self-managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Stack or on-premises
In this article we will learn the steps to monitor your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from Azure Monitor.
Pre-requisites
- An Azure subscription. If you don’t have one, sign up here for free
- An AKS cluster with monitoring enabled. If you don’t have one here are the steps to create an AKS cluster from Azure CLI
- A Log Analytics Workspace. You can create a workspace when you enable monitoring of your new AKS cluster.
- You need to have Owner role on your AKS cluster and Log Analytics contributor role to enable container monitoring.
How to access this feature?
Monitoring AKS resources from Azure Monitor can be performed in 2 ways
- directly from AKS cluster or
- Azure monitor
- From AKS Cluster:
- Click on your AKS cluster from Azure Portal
- Monitoring >> Insights
- You will notice a series of tabs to monitor your AKS Cluster, Nodes, Containers, Controllers, Deployments etc.. I have pasted some screenshots below
2. From Azure Monitor:
- Type “monitor” in the search box in Azure Portal
- Click on Insights >> Containers
- Click on the AKS cluster you are interested in
- You will see the same chart that was shown above
Understand AKS Cluster health with Azure Monitor
In Azure Monitor for containers, the Health (preview) feature provides proactive health monitoring of your Kubernetes cluster to help you identify and diagnose issues. It gives you the ability to view significant issues detected.
Kubernetes cluster health is based on a number of monitoring scenarios organized by
AKS Infrastructure:provides a rollup of the Kubernetes API server, ReplicaSets, and DaemonSets running on nodes deployed in your cluster by evaluating CPU and memory utilization, and a Pods availability
AKS Nodes: provides a rollup of the Node pools and state of individual Nodes in each pool, by evaluating CPU and memory utilization, and a Node’s status as reported by Kubernetes
Conclusion
Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications and services by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.