Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network Policy is a critical part of building a robust developer platform, but the learning curve to address complex real-world policies is not tiny. It is painful to get the YAML syntax right. There are many subtleties in the behavior of the network policy specification (e.g., default allow/deny, wildcarding, rules combination, etc.). Even an experienced Kubernetes YAML-wrangler can still easily tie their brain in knots working through an advanced network policy use case.

Today we’re excited to introduce the Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Grafana Cloud users can now easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes cluster metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud.

Observability is the key to solving problems quickly, and organizations use many tools to try to increase visibility in their environments so they don’t miss anything. Typical sources of observability include metrics, logs, and traces. The foundation of monitoring, metrics are predictable counts or measurements that are aggregated over a specific period of time. Timestamped records of discrete events that can store outputs from applications, systems, and services.

When you hear the word "Thanos," your first thought might be the Marvel Cinematic Universe villain from the Avengers: Infinity War film who seeks to collect the Infinity Stones and end half of all life in the universe. But if you mention the word to a data nerd, you're likely to get a very different response. Prometheus is a free and open-source platform for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting.

What an exciting month, with PromCon Online 2021 and KubeCon EU 2021! These presentations were full of feature announcements, live demos, and inspiring use cases. Here are our highlights of the PromCon Online 2021!

Containers and Kubernetes have changed the way we operate applications. This has been a boon for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps professionals who handle infrastructure management. Yet, it has come at a cost to many who develop and operate applications. Their experience has become more complicated and cumbersome.

Whether you’re new to the cloud native space or an accomplished practitioner, you’re probably aware that there are many Kubernetes distributions to choose from. Maybe you’ve heard about the challenges of getting up and running with Kubernetes. Guess what? It doesn’t have to be hard. This blog provides an introduction to K3s, a lightweight CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. We’ll look at what makes K3s different from other Kubernetes distributions.

Security has always been a wide and complex topic. A recent survey from StackRox about the state of containers and Kubernetes security provides some interesting data on these topics. In this blog post, I’ll dive into some of the findings in that survey and introduce you to Kubewarden, an open source policy engine. A staggering 66 percent of the survey participants do not feel confident enough in the security measures they have in place.