Introducing Kubernetes Explorer

We are excited to announce the launch of Kubernetes Explorer, a powerful new addition designed to simplify visualizing and troubleshooting containerized applications in Kubernetes environments. Kubernetes Explorer enables DevOps, SRE, and engineering to easily understand disparate Kubernetes components, detect issues quickly, uncover root causes and resolve them faster than ever before.

Kubernetes is how companies run containers. According to the latest CNCF survey, 84% of organizations run or plan to run containerized workloads on Kubernetes. AI and edge deployments are further driving Kubernetes adoption in both enterprises and startups. 

Gartner predicts that, “by 2027, more than 75% of all AI deployments will use container technology as the underlying compute environment and by 2028, 80% of custom software running at the physical edge will be deployed in containers, which is an increase from 10% in 2023″

Kubernetes gives cloud platform portability and the required agility by automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Despite the benefits, many enterprises encounter challenges as they progress in their journey to cloud-native. CNCF survey reveals that “Monitoring and observability are fast becoming more challenging especially for systems with large numbers of containers.”

Dynamic and distributed containerized deployments create a massive amount of fragmented data across metrics, traces, and logs. While traditional solutions cannot handle the high volume of fast-moving data, even the current generation of observability solutions struggles to provide contextual insights across data formats, application deployments, the Kubernetes platform, and cloud-native infrastructure.

Introducing Kubernetes Explorer

Kubernetes Explorer provides teams with an intuitive way to visualize and troubleshoot health and performance issues. As the scale of distributed systems increases, so does the operational complexity in monitoring and observability of distributed applications and infrastructure. Observe addresses this challenge by unifying fragmented data across metrics, traces, and logs, providing insights that span applications, the Kubernetes platform, and cloud-native infrastructure with Kubernetes Explorer.

With Kubernetes Explorer teams get:

Faster Incident Resolution

Observe’s Agentic AI Investigator accelerates root cause analysis and problem resolution by understanding the current state of the system, looking at past patterns and recent code commits, using existing runbooks, automating repetitive tasks, discerning root cause and suggesting resolution steps.

Kubernetes Explorer acts as an agentic tool to analyze every component of a distributed application—including the Kubernetes platform – nodes, pods, or workloads. It builds custom, incident-specific visualizations and generates suggestions so that on-call engineers receive an AI-generated Investigation Plan, accelerating troubleshooting and dramatically reducing MTTR.

Kubernetes Hindsight

Existing solutions from other vendors can only provide curated visibility into the current state of Kubernetes deployments, Kubernetes Explorer also offers observability into the historical state of Kubernetes components, allowing you to understand and resolve pesky, hard-to-recreate performance issues.

Instant Visibility and Drill Downs

Kubernetes Explorer offers a quick overview of the entire Kubernetes environment with the flexibility to dive deeper into specific clusters, namespaces, nodes, pods, containers, or deployed workloads instantly.

Lifecycle events give a precise understanding of the steps Kubernetes takes in managing resources. This is essential for isolating the exact step and reasons if a performance issue arises.

Contextual Pivots

Pivoting to pre-filtered logs provides granular visibility into application, Kubernetes, and container logs to correlate performance across the entire stack without any context switching. 

Release Insights

Anomalies or unexpected behavior can be introduced whenever a new version of a workload is deployed. Kubernetes Explorer provides detailed visibility into the deployment manifests of all Kubernetes resources, along with the ability to compare them with previously deployed versions to pinpoint specific changes.

Resource Optimization

In Kubernetes, resource allocation for containers is managed by specifying Requests and Limits in deployment descriptors. A Request specifies the minimum amount of resources that Kubernetes guarantees for a container, while a Limit sets the maximum amount the container can use. Kubernetes uses these values to schedule pods on nodes with enough available capacity. However, if Requests are set too high, Kubernetes may reserve excessive resources for the container, leading to over-provisioning. This can cause inefficient resource utilization, as nodes may appear “full” even if actual usage is low, leaving resources underutilized and increasing operational costs.

CNCF Cloud Native FinOps survey reveals that over half of the companies found Kubernetes can get quite expensive – the main reason – over-provisioning infrastructure resources by Kubernetes, reported by 70% of respondents.

According to Gartner:

Kubernetes does not reduce costs by default, and a poorly configured environment can actually increase costs. Kubernetes clusters require continuous management of capacity and efficient operations to be cost-effective.

Treat the application of requests and limits by developers as a compliance requirement for production deployments.

Kubernetes Explorer solves this challenge with detailed, out of the box visibility into the consumption and Requests or Limits on resources allowing teams to optimize resource utilization, leading to cost savings while ensuring optimal performance.

Get Started with Kubernetes Explorer

Kubernetes Explorer simplifies observability and enables teams to quickly detect and resolve issues no matter where they occur in the distributed Kubernetes stack. Check out how Kubernetes Explorer can make your teams more productive. If you are not already using Observe, begin your journey by signing up for a free trial today.

Meet us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 at booth R24 to get a demo of Kubernetes Explorer and OpenTelemetry-Native Observability. Our team is excited to meet you and discuss your specific observability challenge and use cases. We are looking forward to meeting you at KubeCon.