Azure Monitor for containers has been generally available for a while now, providing comprehensive viability to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters and the applications deployed in it. Did you know this can be applied on Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters as well?!
Monitor this, monitor that
As Kubernetes becomes more and more the de-facto container orchestration platform out there, the need for an organization's operations maturity around it is facing a lot of challenges.
Now, it's even if the current challenges are not enough, Kubernetes deployments sprawling across multiple cloud providers and on-premises is adding another dimension to these challenges.
Specifically, when you have different ways and interfaces to monitor those clusters and the applications deployed on top of it.
1st party experience
If you are an AKS user, you might already be leveraging the Azure Monitor for containers integrated experience and if not, well, you should.
With this integration, you are getting all the Kubernetes-related performance metrics, telemetry, and metadata you need. Not just on the cluster-level, but also the relevant information on the applications deployed on the cluster as you can see in the below figure.
Bring "outsiders" to the party
Having AKS integrate with Azure Monitor for containers, a 1st party Azure product is a given and mandatory but now that we have Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters projected in Azure, wouldn’t make sense to have the same integration for these clusters as well?! Of course so!
By onboarding the Kubernetes clusters outside of Azure using Arc and deploy the Operations Management Suite Agent in the cluster, we are able to connect the clusters to an Azure Log Analytics workspace, same as we are doing for AKS and as a result, have the same monitoring experience for outside Kubernetes clusters.
As you can from the below figure, we are getting the same performance metrics, both on the cluster and the application-level, metadata and all the telemetry one might need but now, it is a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster we are looking at - that’s dope!
Get Started Today
In this post, we briefly touched on Azure Monitor for containers integration with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters and showed how you can have a unified monitoring experience for both AKS clusters and the Kubernetes clusters deployed outside of Azure.
To get started, visit the Azure Arc Jumpstart GitHub repository, where you can find more than 30 Azure Arc deployment guides and automation, including how to onboard your Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters and start using Azure Monitor for containers with it. I addition, visit the official Azure Arc documentation page where you can find more information.
Also, check out these additional great Azure Arc blog posts!