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Automated full-stack monitoring for SUSE CaaS 3.0 now available

SUSECON 2019 took place a couple of weeks ago in Nashville, Tennessee. SUSE’s annual user conference was just as vibrant and energetic as the famous country music capital.

Newly independent SUSE (since March 15 under ownership of Swedish-based private equity firm EQT) has made several announcements around Kubernetes, further emphasizing their push towards modern application delivery via containers.
Kubernetes, the de-facto standard for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized application has enjoyed tremendous growth and popularity over the last year or so. The rise of Kubernetes was no surprise. With the advent of microservices, came the need for launching them in containers and orchestrating these containers in a tool like Kubernetes.

SUSE released its own version of Kubernetes, SUSE CaaS in 2017, providing a turnkey enterprise class container management solution for enterprise customers, enabling them to reduce application delivery cycle times and improve business agility. SUSE released its current version CaaS 3.0 in June 2018 with better support for cluster optimization, more secure container image management and an updated release of Kubernetes, simplifying the management of long-running workloads.
As a SUSE technology partner, Dynatrace has been working on providing official support for CaaS 3.0, which is available as of now.

Getting started with full-stack monitoring for your SUSE CaaS environment is easy

To get the most out of Dynatrace, it’s highly recommended you deploy OneAgent on all your Kubernetes cluster nodes via the OneAgent Operator for full-stack visibility. Leveraging the Kubernetes Operator concept, Dynatrace takes care of the lifecycle management (deployment, update, and uninstallation) of OneAgent in your vanilla Kubernetes or SUSE CaaS environments.

Using this approach, Dynatrace automatically starts container monitoring as they are launched and provides insights into the details of the applications’ performance. By leveraging the new Kubernetes API integration, you’ll get even more insights into resource utilization of cluster nodes.

The screenshot below shows cluster-level metrics for SUSE CaaS 3. As we can see, the cluster has a total of 12 CPUs, where 0.79 CPUs are allocated to container CPU requests, while 11.2 CPUs are still available for running additional containers. The chart below shows CPU and Memory usage for the cluster as a whole, which can be a starting point for investigating specific nodes.

Cluster-level metrics for SUSE CaaS 3.0

By clicking “Analyze Nodes” you’ll get more insights into the per node utilization and you’ll be able to directly jump into the host view to start the investigation if something seems to be out of the ordinary like in the example below.

SUSE CaaS per node utilization

How to get started

Go to dynatrace.com/signup/ to start a free 14-day trail, make sure to read the step-by-step instructions on how to set up monitoring with OneAgent Operator for SUSE CaaS 3.0, and you are ready to go in no time.