Red Hat OpenShift is an open-source, cloud application development platform that enables you to develop, deploy, and manage applications on your cloud infrastructure. We at Wavefront provide enterprise-grade observability and analytics for multiple Kubernetes environments across multiple clouds, now certified for the latest version of OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift 4. Wavefront ingests, analyzes, and visualizes OpenShift telemetry – metrics, histograms, traces, span logs – across the full-stack environment, including distributed containerized applications, Kubernetes, public cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Plus, Wavefront monitors enterprise Kubernetes environments at scale, proven to support 200,000+ containers per cluster in use and 1,000s of developers.
As a result of Wavefront’s collaboration with Red Hat, you can now get automated enterprise observability for OpenShift that’s full-stack, through the Red Hat Certified Wavefront Operator for OpenShift 4.X (“Wavefront Operator”). You can find it in Operator Hub, a public registry for finding Kubernetes Operator-backed services.
With the Wavefront Operator, engineers, developers, and OpenShift operators get:
- Accelerated and automated transition into Kubernetes and applications observability
- Streamline day 2 observability operations – from deployments to configurations and upgrades of the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes and Wavefront Proxy(ies)
- Automated full-stack enterprise observability and deep insight analytics across the entire OpenShift environment
Figure 1: Wavefront Enterprise Observability for Your Entire OpenShift Estate, Full-Stack
What the Wavefront Operator Does for You?
The Wavefront Operator adds another level of ease to installing and maintaining the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes and the Wavefront Proxy to your OpenShift clusters. It installs, upgrades, and continuously checks the health of the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes and Wavefront Proxy(ies). It reduces costs and risks of managing observability for OpenShift environments and applications at scale. It also improves time-to-value by pretesting and expediting the deployment and configuration of the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes.
In essence, the Wavefront Operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing OpenShift observability using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling. The Wavefront Operator runs in a pod on the cluster and interacts with the Kubernetes API server. It installs a Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes instance on each node in the OpenShift cluster, taking advantage of resource definitions, an extension mechanism in Kubernetes. Unless you specify you want to send data to Wavefront using direct ingestion, the Wavefront Operator also installs and configures one or more Wavefront proxies. The Wavefront Operator watches for Wavefront Collectors for Kubernetes instances and is notified when they are being added or modified. When the Wavefront Operator receives a notification, it starts running a loop to ensure that all the required connections between the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes and the OpenShift environment are available and are configured in the way the user expressed in the specification.
The Wavefront Operator also ensures that new Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes versions are deployed using a rolling update with no downtime, making it easy to stay up-to-date.
Through continuous certification, the interoperability and safety of the Wavefront Operator are verified on an ongoing basis, with a fast turnaround for security updates.
Simple Installation for OpenShift Observability
If you are a Wavefront customer, Wavefront will automatically detect your OpenShift clusters on public infrastructure after you have supplied your read-only credentials. With the one-line setup, Wavefront starts to automate Kubernetes and application observability of your OpenShift clusters.
Figure 2: Wavefront Automated Detection and Observability of Your OpenShift Clusters
If not yet Wavefront user, you can install the Wavefront Operator by following these easy steps:
- Using the OpenShift administrator console web interface, browse to the OpenShift OperatorHub
- Search for Wavefront Operator
- Click on the Wavefront Operator tile
- Go through Wavefront Operator Overview and check all the operator metadata and links
- Click on the Install button
- Follow the step-by-step installation instructions
Enterprise Observability for OpenShift that’s Automated and Full-Stack
After you start OpenShift observability from Wavefront, Wavefront starts to:
- Automatically recognize Kubernetes services
- Discover Kubernetes workloads and instrument Java-based services across any cloud
- Populate pre-packaged multi-layered Kubernetes dashboards
- Report at scale, up to 1-sec resolution (sub-1-sec with histograms), streaming health and SLO metrics for OpenShift clusters, nodes, pods, and containerized applications
- Show detailed information about Kubernetes environment operations and autoconfigure a set of Kubernetes-related alerts
Figure 3: Complete Visibility into OpenShift Cluster Nodes, Namespaces, Pods, Containers
You can now start using and customizing the out-of-the-box pre-configured dashboards. You can alleviate code issues by understanding Kubernetes system metrics and instantly troubleshoot containers and applications microservices. With Wavefront’s powerful analytics, you can correlate and quickly drill down across containerized applications running on OpenShift, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Also, engineers such as developers, SREs, and operations engineers can deep-dive into any incident using distributed tracing to trace transactions across distributed services and identify root cause in seconds. With Wavefront’s sophisticated AI-driven performance analytics and trends prediction, you can proactively alert on anomalies across containerized applications running on OpenShift environments.
Ready to Get Started?
If you would like immediate, deep visibility into your entire OpenShift environment, sign-up for a Wavefront free trial. With the Red Hat Certified Wavefront Operator for OpenShift 4, you will benefit from accelerated transition into enterprise observability for OpenShift that’s automated and full-stack. Wavefront streamlines day 2 observability operations, providing deep insight analytics across your entire OpenShift environment, including containerized applications, Kubernetes, and the underlying infrastructure.
Special Thank You to Anirban Dey (@Anirbandey2011), and Srinivas Kandula (@kanduls) for contribution to this blog.
Anirban is a Product Line Manager at Wavefront by VMware. He is currently involved with expanding the Wavefront Integration portfolio and building new Wavefront integrations. He loves to learn and play with all the latest technologies around the developer platform/ecosystem and solve critical customer problems. In his spare time, he loves to travel, explore various cuisines, and listen to music.
Srinivas is a Staff Engineer at Wavefront By VMware. He is currently working on adding more integrations to Wavefront. He loves to learn and play with the latest technologies and build solutions with them. In his spare time, he loves to go cycling, swimming, and running.
Get Started with Wavefront Follow @nesgor Follow @WavefrontHQ
The post Got OpenShift? Need Observability That’s Automated, Full Stack and Unified? Make a Shift to Wavefront! appeared first on Wavefront by VMware.
