Container Monitoring for GitOps Environments

What is GitOps?

GitOps is an operational method for software development, in which all aspects of a project's infrastructure are stored in a Git repository. This includes infrastructure code files, configuration files, and application code. When a Git commit is pushed to source control, this automatically triggers an update to cloud infrastructure or the application itself.

GitOps uses a central Git repository as its single source of information. This means that only changes to the Git repository can trigger infrastructure and application builds and deployments. Organizations that use Kubernetes as their container orchestration platform often use GitOps to ease deployment and improve the consistency and reliability of their Kubernetes clusters.
GitOps Principles

Here are some of the key principles of GitOps:

1. GitOps relies on version control tools like Git, GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. These platforms serve as a centralized repository of infrastructure as code (IaC) and orchestration files.

2. GitOps uses declarative configuration for all environments in the software development lifecycle, including test, staging, and production. Declarative configuration files, describing the desired state of the system, are stored in the same repository as the code. This means they can be accessed by all relevant members of the project, iteratively tested, and improved.

3. GitOps relies on observability, the ability to measure the internal state of a system by examining the output it provides. While monitoring requires knowing what to monitor, observability allows the user to decide what to monitor based on the performance of the system over time. GitOps uses observability to identify the current state of an environment and synchronize it with a desired state.

4. GitOps uses Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tooling that automates the building, testing, and deployment of applications and services, in line with other GitOps principles.

GitOps Uses for Containers and Kubernetes

Here are several ways you can leverage GitOps for Kubernetes and containers:

1. Continuous deployment for Kubernetes—enables you to push applications more quickly and eliminates the need to use several different deployment management systems.

2. Continuous delivery for Kubernetes—helps you build, test, and deploy software rapidly using incremental updates. Continuous delivery for Kubernetes enables you to add continuous integration and a runtime pipeline to read and write files to Git, load container images, and update container repositories.

3. Centralized control—GitOps enables you to use one tool to control the infrastructure, set up version control for configuration changes, implement continuous monitoring for changes, and receive alert notifications.

What Is Container Monitoring?

Container monitoring continuously collects metrics and tracks the health of your containerized applications. This can help improve health, performance, and uptime of microservices environments. Container monitoring is a subset of observability, and includes log aggregation and analysis, tracking, alerting, and visualization.

Container monitoring systems, such as Kubernetes Lens, an open source observability solution, can help operators understand what is happening at the container runtime and application, rather than at the cluster or host level. This makes it possible to make decisions about compute instances, pod provisioning, and container cluster configuration.

Another important aspect of container monitoring is that it can generate alerts that dynamically trigger reconciliation actions. For example, you can proactively monitor memory utilization to identify thresholds, notify operators when resource consumption reaches resource limits, or even automatically add nodes ahead of time when available CPU and memory capacity is running out.

A good monitoring system should provide an overview of the entire application, as well as relevant information about each component. Here are key capabilities of container monitoring solutions:

• Overall application performance across multiple containers and technology platforms
• Smart analysis of events and logs to detect anomalies and notify operators
• Ability to drill down into each component to isolate and identify root cause
• Easy way to add instrumentation to application code
• Advanced alerting and notification that integrates with the organization’s tool ecosystem
• Ability to view, analyze, and alert on metrics and logs from different data sources

Conclusion: The Importance of Container Monitoring for GitOps Environments

GitOps is a highly efficient work model, but can also create visibility challenges. A GitOps system automatically reconciles Kubernetes clusters with configuration stored in Git. However, it can be difficult to understand what is currently running on the cluster and what actions the Git controller is taking.

Container monitoring solutions can fill this crucial gap. With a robust container monitoring strategy, you can gain full visibility over Kubernetes clusters, understand if the GitOps process is working properly, identify issues and remediate them. Most importantly - when GitOps fails to make the necessary changes on the cluster for any reason, teams can be notified and take action immediately.