What are the most important DevOps metrics for monitoring Kubernetes clusters?

1 Cluster Health

Cluster health metrics measure the availability and capacity of your Kubernetes clusters and nodes. They include metrics such as cluster size, node status, node capacity, node allocatable resources, node resource utilization, pod status, pod distribution, and pod resource requests and limits. These metrics help you track the overall health and performance of your clusters and nodes, identify issues such as resource shortages, node failures, or pod crashes, and plan for scaling or maintenance actions.

2 Cluster Performance

Cluster performance metrics measure the efficiency and quality of your Kubernetes clusters and nodes. They include metrics such as cluster latency, cluster throughput, cluster error rate, node uptime, node load, node network traffic, node disk usage, node disk I/O, node CPU usage, node memory usage, pod startup time, pod restarts, pod network traffic, pod disk usage, pod disk I/O, pod CPU usage, and pod memory usage. These metrics help you optimize the performance and resource utilization of your clusters and nodes, detect and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, anomalies, or errors, and tune your cluster and pod configurations.

3 Cluster Security

Cluster security metrics measure the compliance and risk of your Kubernetes clusters and nodes. They include metrics such as cluster policy violations, cluster vulnerability scans, cluster audit logs, node security patches, node firewall rules, node access logs, pod security policies, pod network policies, pod security contexts, pod secrets, pod service accounts, and pod access logs. These metrics help you enforce and verify the security policies and best practices of your clusters and nodes, identify and remediate security vulnerabilities, threats, or breaches, and monitor and audit the security activities and events of your clusters and nodes.

4 Cluster Cost

Cluster cost metrics measure the financial impact of your Kubernetes clusters and nodes. They include metrics such as cluster cost per hour, cluster cost per month, node cost per hour, node cost per month, pod cost per hour, pod cost per month, resource cost per unit, resource utilization per unit, resource wastage per unit, and resource savings per unit. These metrics help you estimate and optimize the cost of running your clusters and nodes, allocate and track the cost of your clusters and nodes to different teams or projects, identify and eliminate resource inefficiencies or overprovisioning, and implement cost-saving strategies such as autoscaling or spot instances.

5 Application Health

Application health metrics measure the availability and reliability of your Kubernetes applications. They include metrics such as application availability, application uptime, application downtime, application error rate, application response time, application throughput, application latency, application SLA compliance, application SLO compliance, application reliability score, and application MTTR. These metrics help you monitor and improve the health and reliability of your applications, identify and resolve application errors or failures, measure and report the application service level agreements (SLAs) and objectives (SLOs), and reduce the mean time to recovery (MTTR) of your applications.

6 Application Performance

Application performance metrics measure the efficiency and quality of your Kubernetes applications. They include metrics such as application resource utilization, application resource requests and limits, application resource efficiency, application resource scaling, application cache hit rate, application cache miss rate, application queue length, application queue time, application concurrency, application transactions, application requests, application responses, application errors, and application traces. These metrics help you optimize the performance and resource utilization of your applications, detect and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, anomalies, or errors, tune your application resource requests and limits, and implement application resource scaling policies.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?