An important early step (just after “Orchestration & Application Definition” in the CNCF trail map) in starting your cloud-native journey is picking solutions for observability, including monitoring, logging, and tracing. All of these observability tools leverage data available from Kubernetes’ comprehensive APIs. Those APIs provide insights into the events that are occurring inside of the Kubernetes platform, including answers to questions like: “What’s running in my Kubernetes cluster?”

CNCF Ambassador Chris Short and I recently co-hosted a webinar with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on the seven most useful Kubernetes APIs for comprehensive cloud-native observability. In this whitepaper, I’ll recap that webinar, walking through the various APIs that are necessary for complete visibility into your Kubernetes platform. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of how Kubernetes works, with a behind-the-scenes look at cloud-native observability.