Because Kubernetes workloads are highly dynamic, ephemeral, and are deployed on a distributed and agile infrastructure, Kubernetes poses a unique set of monitoring and observability challenges. As such, Kubernetes-native monitoring and observability is required to monitor and troubleshoot communication issues between microservices in the Kubernetes cluster.

More specifically, context about microservices, pods, and namespaces is needed so that multiple teams can collaborate effectively to identify and resolve issues. Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise help rapidly pinpoint and resolve performance, connectivity, and security policy issues between microservices running on Kubernetes clusters across the entire stack.

Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise are currently the only Kubernetes monitoring tools that offer the following unique features for Kubernetes observability:

Dynamic Service Graph – A point-to-point, topographical representation of traffic flow and policy that shows how workloads within the cluster are communicating, and across which namespaces. Also includes advanced capabilities to filter resources, save views, and troubleshoot service issues.

DNS Dashboard – Helps accelerate DNS-related troubleshooting and problem resolution in Kubernetes environments by providing an interactive UI with exclusive DNS metrics.

L7 Dashboard – Provides a high-level view of HTTP communication across the cluster, with summaries of top URLs, request duration, response codes, and volumetric data for each service.

Dynamic Packet Capture – Captures packets from a specific pod or collection of pods with specified packet sizes and duration, in order to troubleshoot performance hotspots and connectivity issues faster.

Application-level Observability – Provides a centralized, all-encompassing view of service-to-service traffic in the Kubernetes cluster to detect anomalous behavior like attempts to access applications or restricted URLs, and scans for particular URLs.

Unified Controls – A single, unified management plane provides a centralized point-of-control for unified security and observability on multiple clouds, clusters, and distros. Users can monitor and observe across environments with a single pane of glass.