Understanding what is happening in your cluster can be challenging. How can you quickly and easily tell if your cluster and apps are healthy, well utilized and running as expected?

In this tutorial, we'll look at various aspects of Kubernetes observability, and present multiple OSS solutions from the CNCF landscape and beyond to achieve that.

We will start with tools that simply query the Kubernetes API and deliver the output in an easy-to-understand UI (e.g. Skooner, k9s), go over sidecar-based and eBPF-based services meshes (e.g. Istio/Kiali, Cilium/Hubble UI) and end with application-side logging and monitoring (e.g. OpenTelemetry, fluentd, Jaeger, Grafana). Each level of observability demands a certain price in terms of configuration and runtime overhead. In turn the quality and depth of the information is different.

The intended take-away is to get an understanding which type of tooling is the right one for a given purpose. Most options will be shown in a live demonstration.