Comprehensive container-based service monitoring with Kubernetes and Istio

Do you have a real understanding of the performance of your new Kubernetes service, or do you just know what the average user is seeing? Fred Moyer explains how to get a comprehensive understanding of your Kubernetes infrastructure with a little math and an Istio service mesh implementation for your container-based infrastructure.

Operating containerized infrastructure brings with it a new set of challenges, particularly with instrumenting your containers, evaluating your API endpoint performance, and identifying bad actors in your infrastructure. The Istio service mesh enables instrumentation of APIs without code change and provides service latencies for free. But how do you actually make sense all that data? With math, that’s how. Fred Moyer explains how to get a comprehensive understanding of your Kubernetes infrastructure with a little math and an Istio service mesh implementation for your container-based infrastructure. You’ll learn about infrastructure performance and discover how to determine if your services are under- or overprovisioned. Along the way, Fred demonstrates mathematical techniques to ask and answer business queries and walks you through creating RED (rate, errors, and duration) dashboards that provide insight into API performance (which are essential for meeting service level objectives) and implementing cost-effective monitoring at scale with histograms (which preserve metric fidelity and enable statistical analysis).