Observability Platform — Components and tools
This post is part of a series of blogs about setting up an Observability platform for an organization. This series includes the details of observability platform components, architecture, and the tool stack used to build the platform.
- Observability Platform — Introduction
- Observability Platform — Components and tools
- Observability Platform — Metrics (Prometheus & Grafana)
- Observability Platform — Logs
- Observability Platform — Traces
Components and tools:
The above diagram shows the components of an observability platform for Kubernetes-based applications and the tools we can use to build the platform.
As described in the previous post the main pillars of the observability platform are Logs, Traces and Metrics.
Logs: Promtail is the tool used to collect the console logs from an application and Loki is the tool used to visualize the logs through Grafana. If the application uses file-based logs we can use Filebeat to collect the logs from the application and stream them to an index in elastic search. Then elastic search can be added as a data source in Grafana for visualization.
Traces: Open telemetry can be used to collect traces from the application and Tempo can be used to visualize the traces in Grafana
Metrics: Prometheus is the most popular open-source tool used to collect metrics from an application deployed in Kubernetes. We install Prometheus within the application cluster, this will collect different metrics from the cluster related to the cluster resources and application. Then Prometheus metrics endpoint can be added as a data source in Grafana for visualization.
We will discuss these tools and setup in detail in upcoming posts in this series.
We discuss metrics collection in the next part of this series, Observability Platform — Metrics (Prometheus & Grafana)
