Monitor Amazon EKS with AppDynamics

June 28 2018
 

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) makes it easier to operate Kubernetes clusters, but performance monitoring remains a top challenge. AppDynamics seamlessly integrates into EKS environments, providing insights into the performance of every microservice deployed, all through a single pane of glass.


On the heels of announcing the general availability of AppDynamics for Kubernetes monitoring at KubeCon Europe, we’ve partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring Amazon EKS to the broader Kubernetes community. AppDynamics provides enterprise-grade, end-to-end performance monitoring for applications orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Amazon EKS, AWS’s managed Kubernetes service, shoulders the heavy lifting of installing and operating your own Kubernetes clusters. Beyond the operational agility and simplicity in managing Kubernetes clusters, Amazon EKS brings additional value to enterprises, including the following:

1. Choice and Portability: Built on open source and upstream Kubernetes, EKS passes CNCF’s conformance tests, enabling enterprises to run applications confidently on EKS without having to make changes to the app or learn new Kubernetes tooling. You can choose where to run applications on various Kubernetes deployment venues—on-premises, AWS clusters managed with kops, Amazon EKS, or any other cloud provider.

2. High Availability: EKS deploys the control plane in at least two availability zones, monitors the health of the master nodes, and re-instantiates the master nodes, if needed, automatically. Additionally, it patches and updates Kubernetes versions.

3. Network Isolation and Performance: Worker nodes run in the subnets within your VPC, giving you control over network isolation via security groups.

Amazon EKS brings VPC networking to Kubernetes pods and removes the burden of running and managing overlay networking fabric. CNI plugin runs as a DaemonSet on every node, and allocates an IP address to every pod from the pool of secondary IP addresses attached to the elastic network interface (ENI) of the worker node instance. Communication between control plane and worker nodes occurs over AWS networking backbone, resulting in better performance and security.

Monitoring Amazon EKS with AppDynamics

EKS makes it easier to operate Kubernetes clusters; however, performance monitoring remains one of the top challenges in Kubernetes adoption. In fact, according to a recent CNCF survey, 46% of enterprises reported monitoring as their biggest challenge. Specifically, organizations deploying containers on the public cloud, cite monitoring as a big challenge. Perhaps because cloud providers monitoring tools may not play well with organization’s existing tools which are used to monitor on-premises resources.

We are therefore excited that AppDynamics and AWS have teamed up to accelerate your EKS adoption.

How Does it Work?

AppDynamics seamlessly integrates into EKS environments. The machine agent runs as a DaemonSet on EKS worker nodes, and application agents are deployed alongside your application binaries within the application pods. Out-of-the-box integration gives you the deepest visibility into EKS cluster health, AWS resources and Docker containers, and provides insights into the performance of every microservice deployed—all through a single pane of glass.

 

Unified, end-to-end monitoring helps AppDynamics’ customers expedite root-cause analysis, reduce MTTR, and confidently adopt microservice monitoring. AppDynamics provides a consistent approach to monitoring applications orchestrated by Kubernetes regardless where the clusters are deployed – on Amazon EKS or on-premises enabling enterprises leverage their existing people, processes and tools.

Correlate Kubernetes performance with business metrics: For deeper visibility into business performance, organizations can create tagged metrics, such as customer conversion rate or revenue per channel correlated with the performance of applications on the Kubernetes platform. Health rules and alerts based on business metrics provide intelligent validation so that every code release can drive business outcomes.

Get Started Today

To get started with enterprise-grade monitoring of EKS follow these easy steps:

1. Sign-up for a free AppDynamics trial and configure the environment’s ConfigMap. Sample configuration and instructions are available on our GitHub page.

2. Create the EKS cluster and worker nodes, and configure kubectl with the EKS control plane endpoint. Deploy your Kubernetes services and deployments.

3. Start end-to-end performance monitoring with AppDynamics!

Amit Sharma
Amit Sharma is a Product Marketing Manager at AppDynamics. He has over eleven years of experience in software development, product management, and product marketing. He did his MSCE from Arizona State University and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

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