10 Best Kubernetes Monitoring Tools in 2024

Kubernetes combines the experience of Google’s engineers and community-sourced ideas and practices into an extensible, open-source platform used for managing containerized workloads and services. Kubernetes container orchestration is now an industry practice, and many projects depend on it, which emphasizes the need for a good monitoring solution even more.

What is Kubernetes?

The name comes from Greek and translates roughly as pilot or helmsman. You might also find the abbreviation K8s, representing the eight letters between the "K" and "s". Kubernetes has been Google's open-sourced project since 2014. Kubernetes rose as a solution to issues in software deployment, mostly related to hardware, cost, security, and scalability.

To understand the importance of Kubernetes, we need to understand where it came from and how it works.

Kubernetes's documentation divides deployment into three different eras:

• Traditional Deployment Era
• Virtualized Deployment Era
• Container Deployment Era

What is Kubernetes monitoring?

It's the practice of proactive analysis, management, and troubleshooting of Kubernetes. Monitoring allows you to utilize any containerized infrastructure more efficiently to improve uptime, resource distribution and utilization, and interactions between individual components of your cluster.

If you want to learn more about containers and Kubernetes, scroll down, for more information!

Best Kubernetes monitoring Tools in 2023.

For now, it should be crystal clear, that monitoring of your Kubernetes infrastructure is crucial in the overall success of your project. Now we will dig deeper into software and tools that will help you monitor it.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack aggregates data from your Kubernetes architecture using Vector. Better Stack allows you to query logs like your database thanks to SQL-compatible structured log management running on a custom-built technology and ClickHouse-based storage. This allows you to work with your resources more efficiently and thus, save funds. Seamless integration into any platform allows you to start monitoring and increase your performance and reliability within minutes. Creating a cloud integration is a matter of a few commands, and thanks to complex yet straightforward documentation, you will receive any guidance necessary.

Better Stack offers support for your existing stack. Apart from Kubernetes, Better Stack supports Docker, Dokku, Heroku, Ubuntu/Debian, Vercel, and many more.

Even in the free package, Better Stack offers real-time Live Tail, automated parsing, and a visual query builder. You can also benefit from automated data enrichment and log collection. Better Stack offers unlimited search duration, built-in Grafana, and interactive dashboards. When it comes to collaboration, Better Stack offers Google Docs-ish collaboration and comments with tagging available. You can also create team-based notifications and archive log fragments. Better Stack offers support for Docker, Dokku, Heroku, Ubuntu/Debian, Vercel, and many more.

You can get a rather generous Better Stack package for free; advanced features are available in higher tiers, starting at $24/month.

Explore the full Better Stack demos library

Main benefits of Better Stack:

• Well-designed, Dark Mode UI and Grafana Visualizations
• Real-time observability for applications, infrastructure, and logs.
• Intuitive collaboration dashboards
• Customizable alerts integrated with notification channels (e.g., Slack)
• Native support for seamless monitoring of containerized apps.
• Combines metrics, logs, and traces for effective troubleshooting.
• SQL-like log queries
• Advanced Collaboration Features
• AI for anomaly detection and predictive analytics
• Incident management, uptime monitoring, log management, and API monitoring in one platform
• Built-in status pages
• On-call scheduling
• Dozens of integrations

Cons:

• Not a full observability tool
• Advanced features may require additional time to master.

Pricing:

Better Stack offers a free tier with 3 GB ingested logs/month retained for 3 days and 2B ingested metrics data points retained for 30 days with a 2-month incident history. On the pay-as-you-go plan, you get 30GB of ingested logs and tons of advanced features. In case you would want any additional feature such as 2FA enforcement, you can add it selectively to the plan.

2. Kubernetes Dashboard

The Dashboard is a web-based Kubernetes UI that you can use to manage, deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot your Kubernetes clusters.

The Dashboard screen helps you understand the state of your infrastructure. Individual visualizations are color-based, based on the state and health of individual resources - e.g., a bright green circle shows healthy, active resources such as running Pods, while a red part of a pie graph represents failed resources.

Dashboards also give you an overview of Cron Jobs, Deployments, Pods, Replica Sets, Services, and more.

The Dashboard is a great tool that's free, easy to install, and part of the Kubernetes eco-system; however, it offers only a limited amount of features and is not a "dedicated" monitoring solution, meaning that a lot of work will remain on your shoulders.

Main benefits of Kubernetes Dashboard:

• Native application
• Friendly UI
• Live updates on resource usage and performance metrics
• Easily deploy, manage, and troubleshoot applications and resources
• Free to use and actively maintained by the community
• Supports RBAC for enhanced security and access management

Cons:

• Basic monitoring capabilities; lacks advanced observability tools
• May slow down with a large number of resources or heavy workloads
• Exposing the dashboard can pose security vulnerabilities if not properly secured
• Lacks native alerting features; requires integration with external tools

Pricing:

Kubernetes dashboard is free.

3. Mezmo

Mezmo parses major log line types on ingestion and offers Custom Parsing Templates. You can filter your logs based on app, host, or cluster, browse logs from any source instantly, and search through them with simple keywords, exclusion terms, chained expressions, and data ranges. Alerts are set off based on either Presence or Absence, or generate an alert from a saved View and report on them in PagerDuty, Slack, or with a custom Webhook. Mezmo also allows you to save views to access common Filters and Searches and share them.

Mezmo is built on Elasticsearch, providing you with relatively fast and reliable indexing and filtering of your logs. A web-based GUI handles filtering, logs grouping by source, and more. Visualization and custom dashboards are also available, and you can work with user-specific logs. Agentless log collection via Syslog and HTTP(s) with full-text search and visualizations are available.

Mezmo's pricing packages depend on the retention period in days and the number of users. For starters, you can get LogDNA for free for one user and without any log retention and unlimited saved views.

Main benefits of Mezmo:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing model
• Well-designed UI
• Instant log ingestion and real-time analysis
• Easy-to-navigate dashboards
• Collects logs from multiple sources, including servers, containers, and cloud services
• Advanced search capabilities with filtering options for specific logs and metrics
• Customizable alerts that integrate with various notification channels (e.g., Slack, email)
• Compatible with numerous tools and platforms (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes, Docker)

Cons:

• Can be expensive for larger teams or high data ingestion needs.
• Limited retention periods depending on the pricing tier; may require additional costs for longer retention
• Performance can degrade with very high volumes of logs unless properly configured.
• May not offer as robust analytical features compared to some competitors.

Pricing:

Mezmo offers a free plan that includes basic features for up to 25 users, with a monthly ingress limit of 10 GB and an egress limit of 10 GB. For advanced features, unlimited user access, and SSO monitoring, you need to contact the sales team.

4. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a complex cloud monitoring solution. With support for more than 150 applications and integrations, you can collect and centralize all the necessary data. With real-time analytics, you can rapidly identify and resolve potential cyber-attacks or breaches. With customizable dashboards, you gain full-stack visibility and reliable monitoring results. Machine-learning-based algorithms run around the clock to test and alert you in case of any anomalies or errors.

Sumo Logic offers complete solutions to AWS, GCP, and Azure, promising full infrastructure visibility in each. You can use Sumo Logic as a custom-tailored solution in multiple fields, such as education, gaming, retail, fintech, and even the public sector.

Sumo Logic offers an Infrastructure Monitoring solution, starting at around $0.50/1000 DPM daily average, which would sum up to around $14/month per host. You can try Sumo Logic in a free trial period, combine it with other solutions, or ask for a custom quote.

Main benefits of Sumo Logic:

• CrowdStrike threat intelligence
• Security analytics app framework
• Fully managed service, eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure
• Instant insights and analytics on log data
• Easily scales to handle large volumes of data
• Built-in machine learning capabilities for anomaly detection and predictive analytics
• Integrates seamlessly with various cloud services, applications, and tools (e.g., AWS, Azure, Kubernetes)
• Highly customizable dashboards and visualizations for better data representation

Cons:

• Some users may find the initial setup and configuration complex.
• The wide range of features may require time to learn effectively.
• Extended data retention options may incur additional charges.
• Some users report that support response times can be slower than desired.

Pricing:

Sumo Logic offers monthly or annual subscriptions across five tiers: Free, Essentials, Enterprise Operations, Enterprise Security, and Enterprise Suite. Pricing varies by product, with Cloud Management starting at $3 per GB, Infrastructure Monitoring available from $0.45 per Data Point per Minute (DPM), Application Observability starting at $2.10 per GB, and Audit and Compliance from $3 per GB. For Cloud Security Tools and Cloud SOAR, pricing must be requested from the Sales team.

5. Fluentd

Fluentd is sometimes integrated into the ELK stack - changing it into the EFK stack. Fluentd is a unified logging tool for cloud-native environments allowing you to collect logs in real-time.

You can use Fluentd to collect logs, filters, buffers, and storage in JSON data structure. A plug-in-based system will allow you to extend and customize your architecture. A great advantage is its lightweight operation since it demands about 40MB of RAM while handling more than 13,000 events every second.

Fluentd is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation member project, is available on GitHub, and offers rich and well-written documentation, alongside community support.

Main benefits of Fluentd:

• An open-source, CNCF project
• Free
• Centralizes log collection and processing from multiple sources
• Pluggable design allows easy integration with various data sources and outputs (e.g., Elasticsearch, Kafka)
• Supports real-time log processing and transformation
• Designed to handle large volumes of logs efficiently

Cons:

• Initial setup and configuration can be complex, especially for large deployments.
• May require significant resources in high-traffic environments
• Lacks built-in monitoring tools, requiring additional setup for observability
• Requires time to learn and optimize, particularly for teams new to logging solutions.

Pricing:

Fluentd is free.

6. NetApp Cloud Insights

NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool. Cloud Insights offers an option for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing your resources across public clouds and private data centers.

NetApp offers seamless navigation and observability into Clusters, persistent storage allowing you to correlate storage utilization to workloads, and full-stack visualization, helping you understand individual metrics in context.

Data visualization is ensured by simple yet dynamic dashboards, which allow you to overview critical Kubernetes KPIs. From here, you can view restart counts, calling metrics, pods, and containers that encounter outages, instability, or resource-related issues.

Main benefits of NetApp:

• Full-stack observability
• Well-designed dashboards
• End-to-end visibility across multi-cloud environments, including on-premises and cloud resources
• Monitors application performance and infrastructure health in real-time
• Detailed analytics and insights specifically for storage performance and capacity management

Cons:

• Users may need time to become familiar with all features and functionalities
• Works best within a NetApp ecosystem; less effective with non-NetApp storage solutions

Pricing:

NetApp Cloud Insights offers either a free plan with limited monitoring features or a basic plan starting at $9/month with 13 months of data retention and all of its additional features.

7. Sensu Go

Sensu Go offers a service health and telemetry solution for multi-cloud monitoring. It allows you to understand how your servers, containers, services, apps, and devices operate and cooperate across both public and private clouds.

Sensu Go is often running side-by-side with Prometheus. However, it is not necessary. It offers you an option to run custom scripts and plugins, collect metrics about resource usage, monitor and manage cloud endpoints or deploy a monitoring solution without coding, thanks to pre-defined templates.

Main benefits of Sensu Go:

• Smart alerts possible thanks to PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Jira integrations
• Code-free workflow option
• Monitoring for cloud-native applications, microservices, and traditional IT infrastructure
• Works well across diverse environments, including Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and on-premises setups
• Features an intuitive web-based dashboard

Cons:

• Initial setup and configuration may be challenging for new users
• Advanced features are only available in the commercial version, potentially limiting capabilities for users of the open-source edition
• Some users have reported that documentation could be more comprehensive

Pricing:

Sensu Go offers three plans, starting with a free tier with 100 nodes and 1 site. The Pro plan starts at $3 per node/month with a max of 3000 nodes and a 6-hour SLA response. Lastly, the Enterprise starts at $5 per node/month with unlimited nodes and sites.

8. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers automation and AI tools for Kubernetes monitoring at scale. Using Dynatrace, you can reach full-stack observability. You can use Dynatrace to monitor the availability, health, and resource utilization of Kubernetes infrastructure. You can keep an eye on all the important metrics such as Cluster Resource utilization, Pod and Workload, and native Kubernetes Events. All of the data collected will be visualized. Dynatraces AI offers continual mapping of dependencies and auto-discovery.

You can get Dynatrace either as a Full-stack monitoring solution starting at around $69/month or go for their Infrastructure Monitoring subscription, starting at $21/month for 8GB per Host.

Main benefits of Dynatrace:

• AI-powered Tools
• Full-stack observability available
• Dashboards and health views
• Smart alerting
• Unlimited AI assistance with precise root-cause analysis of Kubernetes problems with DAVIS Causal AI
• Application observability, Prometheus metrics, logs, security, and more

Cons:

• The wealth of features can make initial setup and navigation overwhelming for new users.
• Teams may need time to fully leverage advanced features and AI capabilities.
• Some users may find customization options restrictive compared to other monitoring tools.

Pricing:

Dynatrace’s Kubernetes monitoring starts at $0.002 per hour for any size pod.

9. Datadog

Datadog automatically monitors the nodes of Kubernetes platforms. Datadog’s agent collects metrics, events, and logs from cluster components, workload pots, and other Kubernetes objects. Datadog is a complex solution that enables you to work with logs, metrics, events, and more in real time. Datadog offers more than 500 vendor-backed integrations, including incident management platforms, meaning that you can use the collected metrics to set up alerts.

You can get Datadog for free, with a limitation of 5 hosts (1 node = 1 host). Bear in mind that this plan is heavily limited. For advanced features, you need to subscribe to their premium plans starting at around 15 dollars per Host per month.

Main benefits of Datadog:

• An expensive but powerful solution
• Observability for applications, infrastructure, logs, and user experience in a single platform
• Real-time monitoring and analytics with customizable dashboards and visualizations
• Over 600 integrations with various cloud services, DevOps tools, and third-party applications
• Powerful alerting capabilities, including anomaly detection and alerts based on specific metrics
• An intuitive web-based dashboard
• Designed to scale effortlessly with growing infrastructure and application demands

Cons:

• Can be expensive
• The range of features may be overwhelming for new users
• Standard retention periods for logs and metrics may require additional costs for extended retention
• Some users report that agent installations can impact performance in high-traffic environments
• Customization options may be more limited compared to some specialized monitoring tools
• Basic UI

Pricing:

Datadog employs a pay-per-ingested-GB pricing model, starting at $0.10 per GB of ingested logs or $1.70 per million log events per month, with a 15-day retention period. Additional costs may arise based on longer retention periods and advanced features, such as live tailing and machine learning-powered insights.

10. Jaeger

Jaeger is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project offering open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing. You can use it to monitor and troubleshoot transactions in complex distributed systems. To use Jaeger with Kubernetes, you need to use Jaeger Operator, an implementation of a Kubernetes Operator.

Jaeger offers very well-written documentation, offering a straightforward tutorial on how to integrate it with Kubernetes and further customize it to your needs.

Main Benefits of Jaeger:

• Documentation
• Open-source license
• Insights into complex microservices architectures by tracing requests as they flow through different services
• Helps identify performance bottlenecks and latency issues
• User-friendly web interface for visualizing traces, spans, and performance metrics
• Compatible with various instrumentation libraries and supports popular programming languages and frameworks

Cons:

• It may lack some advanced observability features found in commercial solutions (e.g., comprehensive monitoring and alerting)

Pricing:

Jaeger is free.

Tools summary:

What is a container?

A container is a standardized unit of software (just like a regular container) that packages up code and its dependencies in order to run applications reliably. Companies such as Docker offer a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software, including everything your application needs to perform: code, runtime, sys tools, sys libraries, and configuration.

Docker Container images become containers when they run on Docker Engine and can run both Linux and Windows-based applications.

Advantages of container deployment:

• While being similar to virtual machines, they allow sharing of the OS, making it really lightweight
• Containers allow for better observability beneath the OS-level surface. You can monitor application health and other signals
• Apps run consistently across environments
• Better resource management. You can isolate resources to create a more predictable environment when it comes to performance, which also increases the effectiveness of resource utilization.

Kubernetes Clusters

A cluster is a set of nodes running any containerized application. Clusters are composed of one main node and a number of worker nodes. Any of these nodes can be either a physical or a virtual machine.

Kubernetes Clusters Monitoring

When it comes to cluster monitoring, you want to overview the state of the whole cluster. You are making sure that all nodes in the cluster are working as they should, at what capacity, and how you are managing your resources.

To be able to know all this, you need to gain metrics, especially about:

• Resource utilization. This is a set of metrics such as network bandwidth and hardware-related metrics - CPU, disk, and memory utilization.
• The Number of Nodes. These metrics help you understand if you are utilizing your architecture properly. Meaning that you will understand (especially while using the cloud) how you utilize your cluster. Disk-related issues, such as resource shortages, can lead to severe failures such as data loss or corruption.

Kubernetes Pods

Google defines Pods as the smallest, most basic deployable objects in Kubernetes. A Pod represents a single instance of a running process in your cluster. Pods contain one or more containers, such as Docker containers. When a Pod runs multiple containers, the containers are managed as a single entity and share the Pod’s resources.

Pods Monitoring

Measuring Pod resources helps you understand the load a running Pod will put on the system. These metrics help you to keep an eye on how many nodes you have available, evaluate the situation, predict and prevent any crisis scenarios such as node failure, etc. But you can also monitor Pods themselves and gather information about them. You can keep an eye on resources in context and understand the performance of the individual Pod. If it has enough resources, you can monitor containers, and finally, gather metrics from applications deployed.

Conclusion

In this article, you read a bit about the origins of modern deployment, containers, and finally, Kubernetes. We went over its beginnings and how it operates. Then we proposed a list of the best K8S monitoring tools in 2023. As a wrap-up, we brought you information background about the basics of containers and Kubernetes monitoring.