This post was co-authored by Stela Udovicic, director of product marketing.
Since the VMware Tanzu portfolio was introduced last year at VMworld, we have brought to market multiple Tanzu products and services to help our customers deliver better software faster, by automating the modern app lifecycle, running Kubernetes across clouds, and unifying and optimizing multi-cloud operations.
In addition to delivering new features and functionalities for individual products, the Tanzu team is also working diligently to integrate products across this portfolio, presenting a seamless experience to customers when they use Tanzu products and services together.
Today, we are excited to announce one of the integrations most frequently requested by our customers: integration between VMware Tanzu Mission Control and VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront (Tanzu Observability). With this integration, we are unifying the forces of centralized multicluster Kubernetes management and full-stack Kubernetes observability and analytics, making Kubernetes management more efficient while giving developers more flexibility and autonomy.
Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Observability—better together
Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing Kubernetes infrastructure and applications across multiple teams and clouds. It provides a single control point for infrastructure and platform operators to operate and manage the entire Kubernetes footprint. Its uniquely designed capabilities—such as central lifecycle management, access management, automated policy engine, cluster inspection, and data protection—enable efficient, consistent, and secure management of all your Kubernetes clusters across environments at scale.
Providing a global view into your entire Kubernetes footprint, Tanzu Mission Control offers the high-level observability and diagnostics of Kubernetes infrastructure and the applications running on it. And to better serve the needs of both the platform/SRE and Kubernetes operators for deeper-level visibility, analytics, and diagnostics, we need a dedicated full-stack enterprise-grade observability platform, which is exactly what Tanzu Observability is. Tanzu Observability delivers packaged insights and analytics at massive scale, reliably, and with granular controls, enabling enterprises to roll out telemetry-as-a-service to all their engineering teams.
Enterprise-grade observability from Tanzu Mission Control in seconds
With this new Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Observability integration, you can now install the Wavefront Kubernetes collector on any cluster with a single click through the Tanzu Mission Control UI. After the Wavefront Kubernetes collector is installed, you’ll be able to click out to the Tanzu Observability platform directly through the Tanzu Mission Control UI.
Once the data is in Tanzu Observability, Kubernetes operators can observe the health, performance, and availability of individual clusters as indicated in the dashboard below.
This holistic visibility helps site reliability engineers (SREs) dramatically reduce troubleshooting times as they can quickly scope and isolate issues in a single cluster or understand the impact of an incident across all of the Kubernetes clusters.
Beyond top-level summary metrics, the Wavefront Kubernetes collector gathers core Kubernetes metrics, including cluster, namespace, nodes, pods, containers, CPU, and memory metrics. It can also collect metrics from Prometheus endpoints for centralized views across the entire environment.
Tanzu Observability offers detailed Kubernetes metrics.
To learn more about Tanzu Observability’s Kubernetes metrics collection and dashboarding, check out this blog and this docs page.
Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Observability integration configuration steps
To begin taking advantage of the deep Kubernetes observability described above, including prepackaged dashboards, alerts, and metrics, follow these simple steps in your Tanzu Mission Control UI:
1. Enable Tanzu Observability integration under “Administration”.
2. Install the Wavefront Kubernetes collector on a cluster by specifying the Tanzu Observability URL and API token.
3. After verifying the status of the integration as indicated below, you can start using Tanzu Observability and its deep Kubernetes insights.
Correlate Kubernetes with the application and multi-cloud metrics for full-stack observability
Beyond key Kubernetes health and performance metrics, the value of Tanzu Observability is in its universal collection capabilities, its analytics engine, and its one-click dashboarding, which help you not only collect metrics but also analyze, visualize, and correlate telemetry across your entire environment, including applications and entire multi-cloud environments. SREs and developers get key application performance metrics, such as Request Error and Duration (also known as RED) metrics, distributed traces, and span logs that help them troubleshoot faster.
To take the above-described integration for a spin, contact our sales team for a Tanzu Mission Control trial, and sign up here for a Tanzu Observability trial.
