Monitoring microservices

Your microservices are deployed and running on Kubernetes. You can update the version of your microservices whenever it is needed. Kubernetes takes care of healing and scaling automatically. However, you still need to monitor your system and keep track of errors and performance. This is important for addressing problems, but also for informing you on potential improvements, optimizations, and cost cutting.

There are several categories of information that are relevant and that you should monitor:

• Third-party logs
• Application logs
• Application errors
• Kubernetes events
• Metrics

When considering a system composed of multiple microservices and multiple supporting components, the number of logs will be substantial. The solution is central logging, where all the logs go to a single place where you can slice and dice at your will. Errors can be logged, of course, but often it is useful to report errors with additional metadata, such as stack trace, and review them in their own dedicated environment (for example, sentry or rollbar). Metrics are useful for detecting performance and system health problems or trends over time.

Kubernetes provides several mechanisms and abstractions for monitoring your microservices. The ecosystem provides a number of useful projects too.