kubernetes-monitoring VS Fluentd

The complete code for this post is found here on github. We examine the Dockerfile for it is extended with the elasticsearch plugin. The plugin is required for Elasticsearch is the Data Storage that we will use in this post.

In this post we will encrypt a value and use it in a Helm deployment. The complete code can be found here on github but follow along and learn how to use this technique in all your Helm deployments.

We already saw multiple Custom Resourse Definitions (CRDs) that the Prometheus Operator gives us. The Alertmanager is also a CRD. The definition of this instance is very simple. The complete code for this setup is found on this branch on github.

Prometheus will be a separate pod in your cluster that will scrape given endpoints for information. In this first section we will get this pod running. All code for this section is found on github. Let’s take a look at the Kubernetes resource definition of Prometheus:

Get Started with Fluentd

Currently, there is no cluster-wide logging. Fluentd can be used to have a unified logging layer for the cluster.

Fluentd hasn't been touched for 8 years? Looking at the repo it looks like it's alive and well. https://github.com/fluent/fluentd

Fluentd is an open-source log management and data collection tool. Just like Logstash, Fluentd uses a pipeline-based architecture. This allows it to collect data from various sources and network traffic and forward it to various destinations.

Fluentd is a powerful log management tool that offers organizations the flexibility and scalability required to handle large volumes of log data from a variety of sources and transport it to various destinations. Utilizing a flexible and modular architecture, Fluentd allows users to easily add new input and output plugins to integrate with a wide range of systems and applications. It supports a wide range of data sources and destinations, including databases, message queues, and data stores.

Substation is an affordable alternative to products like Cribl (~10x cost savings) and is easier to manage than similar open-source projects such as Logstash and fluentd. It's been used in production by the security team at Brex for 2+ years and is ready for any scale, even beyond 100,000 events per second!

There are probably too many to chose from. Logstash, Promtail, Vector, Filebeat, FluentD, Logagent and probably many more

To alleviate some of the pain, it’s a good idea to use industry standards and tooling like OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io). For data collection specific to logs, open-source tools like LogStash and Fluentd are also popular.

Created and maintained by the creators of fluentd, fluentbit is a lightweight, fast, and scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. Built specifically for the cloud and containerized environments, it allows users to collect data from any source, enrich it with filters and forward it to the tool of their choice.