DEVOPSdigest

Rancher Labs announced enhanced Prometheus support, delivering greater visibility into Kubernetes clusters and making Rancher the only solution that supports Prometheus in a multi-cluster, multi-tenant environment.

“Prometheus is rapidly becoming part of a must-have technology suite for monitoring cloud native applications,” said Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs. “Rancher’s unique take on multi-cluster, multi-tenant support facilitates a secure and efficient deployment of Prometheus technology on all Kubernetes clusters.”

Delivering Enhanced Visibility Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters and Isolated Tenant Environments

Rancher manages multiple clusters implemented by any distro, on any infrastructure, or by any cloud-managed Kubernetes services.

The enhanced Prometheus support feature works as follows:

- Each time a new Kubernetes cluster is added to Rancher, Rancher deploys a Prometheus operator into the cluster, which then creates a Prometheus deployment in the cluster.

- The cluster-wide Prometheus deployment is used to store cluster-level metrics such as node CPU and memory consumption, as well as project-level metrics collected from applications deployed by individual users.

- The project-level Grafana talks to Prometheus through a secure proxy that implements multi-tenancy for Prometheus. The secure proxy instruments PromQL statements to ensure only the namespaces belonging to the user’s project are included in the query.

Rancher’s enhanced Prometheus support ensures consistent and efficient monitoring and visibility across all Kubernetes clusters, all projects, and all users. The secure proxy ensures isolations across multiple tenants while not requiring duplication of shared data across these tenants. Rancher also collects custom metrics from any pod that exposes an endpoint with data Prometheus can process. All metrics are then available for alerts and decision-making within Rancher, with actions as simple as notifying a user on Slack or PagerDuty, or as complex as initiating horizontal scaling of a workload to handle an increase in load. Rancher also now includes cluster-level and project-level metrics and dashboards, with full security isolation and RBAC.

Enhanced Prometheus support is available as a beta immediately and will be GA in early 2019.