Monitoring any type of resource can be challenging. But Kubernetes monitoring is a special kind of challenge. Not only are there a variety of different Kubernetes layers and resource types to monitor, but collecting monitoring data from Kubernetes can be difficult if you use a managed Kubernetes service that limits your access to the underlying infrastructure. For all of these reasons, Kubernetes monitoring requires a different approach.

The way businesses obtain infrastructure has changed dramatically over the past decade, as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has taken the place of self-hosted infrastructure for most IT deployments. At the same time, it has become common to build complex infrastructures that blend components from multiple providers – such as two or more public clouds (aka. multicloud infrastructure) or mixing an on-prem data center and a public cloud (aka. hybrid cloud infrastructure).