Grafana VS k9s

Monitoring application logs is a crucial aspect of the software development and deployment lifecycle. In this post, we'll delve into the process of observing logs generated by Docker container applications operating within HashiCorp Nomad. With the aid of Grafana, Vector, and Loki, we'll explore effective strategies for log analysis and visualization, enhancing visibility and troubleshooting capabilities within your Nomad environment.

To help us visualize these scenarios, we'll build a Grafana Dashboard so we can follow along.

Visualization and Analysis: Choose a tool with intuitive and customizable dashboards, charts, and visualizations. A question to ask is, "Are the visualization features of this tool user-friendly and adaptable to our team's specific needs?" Tools like Grafana and Kibana provide powerful visualization capabilities.

Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.

Grafana

Yes I'm aware that Grafana is open source but the method I used to find the API endpoints is far quicker than digging through hundreds of files in a codebase I'm not familiar with.

So, you will add one last container to allow us to visualize this data: Grafana, an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows us to see traces and metrics simply. You can set Grafana to read data from both Tempo and Prometheus by setting them as datastores with the following grafana.datasource.yaml config file:

In example above, we use 2 additional parameters: code (HTTP response code) and page (page identifier), which provide detailed statistics. For example, you can build such graphs in Grafana:

Robin switched to the Grafana dashboard tab, and sure enough, the 5xx volume on web service was rising. It had not hit the critical alert thresholds yet, but customers had already started noticing.

Pierre: The first tool I recommend is K9s. It's not just a time-saver but a productivity booster. With its intuitive interface, you can speed up all the usual kubectl commands, access logs, edit resources and configurations, and more. It's like having a personal assistant for your cluster management tasks.

The last thing you really need is a common set of tools that you want fingertip access to. I really commonly use LazyGit and K9s in my day job so those are the tools I will show off in this article.

K9s is your best friend (get it? 🐶) when exploring your cluster via the terminal. It shares commonality with Vim for its interaction style using shortcuts and starting commands with: but don’t let that discourage you. K9s keeps a vigilant eye on Kubernetes activities, providing real-time information and intuitive commands for resource interaction.

k9s: brew install k9s

I would like to put in a vote for k9s, which is also on the list at Terminal Trove. [0] It's the most convenient tool I've ever found for Kubernetes management. Based on that experience I'll definitely be checking out Harlequin.

[0] https://k9scli.io/

$ wget https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases/download/v0.29.1/k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ tar -xzf k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ sudo mv k9s /usr/local/bin/

All in all, run things, do some kubectl apply -f something.yml every day, install k9s, and try to configure a big one cluster at some point.

(K9s is one of my favorite tools for navigating Kubernetes clusters through the CLI).

K9s is an open-source, terminal-based UI for interacting with your Kubernetes clusters, making navigating, observing, and managing your apps easier. If you use Kubectl but wish it was easier and faster to use, K9s might be just what you're looking for!

k9s