Real-world monitoring goes far beyond checking whether a system is up and running. Although health checks like those you learned in Chapter 2, Building a Foundation with Core Kubernetes Constructs, in the Health checks section can help us isolate problem applications, operations teams can best serve the business when they can anticipate the issues and mitigate them before a system goes offline.

The best practices in monitoring are to measure the performance and usage of core resources and watch for trends that stray from the normal baseline. Containers are not different here, and a key component to managing our Kubernetes cluster is having a clear view of the performance and availability of the OS, network, system (CPU and memory), and storage resources across all nodes.

In this chapter, we will examine several options to monitor and measure the performance and availability of all our cluster resources. In addition, we will look at a few options for alerting and notifications when irregular trends start to emerge.