Lexicon · Guide
Kubernetes monitoring built for scale, sovereignty and cost control
What Kubernetes monitoring covers, why cluster telemetry outgrows the budget that pays for it, and what to do about cardinality, retention and cost.
Definition
Kubernetes monitoring is the practice of collecting and reading metrics, logs and traces from every layer of a cluster, from the control plane that schedules the work down to the containers that run it, so you can tell whether the platform and the applications on it are healthy. The short definition of the term sits alongside this guide, which is about running the practice rather than defining it.
Your cluster generates more metrics, logs and traces every quarter, and your observability bill grows faster than your infrastructure spend. Most teams respond by sampling data or shrinking retention, then lose visibility right when an incident needs it most. This guide covers why that happens, and what the alternatives are.
Related terms
- BYOCBYOC, Bring Your Own Cloud, is a deployment model where a vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, operated by the vendor but living on infrastructure the customer owns.
- CardinalityCardinality is the number of distinct values, or distinct value combinations, that an attribute or set of attributes can take.
- Infrastructure monitoringInfrastructure monitoring is the practice of tracking the health, performance, and capacity of the layer applications run on: hosts, virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and managed cloud services.
- Kubernetes monitoringKubernetes monitoring is observability applied to Kubernetes clusters: the nodes, workloads, pods, and containers that run modern applications, plus the control plane that orchestrates them.
- OpenTelemetry CollectorThe OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone process that receives telemetry from applications and infrastructure, transforms it, and exports it to one or more destinations.
- SLOAn SLO, service level objective, is a target for how reliable a service should be, expressed as a measured indicator held over a time window: 99.9 percent of requests succeed over 30 days, or 95 percent of checkouts complete in under two seconds.