Application development and management efficiencies are the key outcomes of microservices adoption. To achieve high efficiency with performance guarantees, it is necessary to have a scalable infrastructure. The cloud offers a sophisticated and scalable infrastructure with unlimited storage. With nearly over 85% of workloads being hosted and managed on cloud infrastructures, having in-depth visibility into cloud services and their behavior has become increasingly important.
Monitoring enables aggregation and analysis of overall application behavior, delivering deep insights. Capturing every microservice interaction is crucial when security, scalability, and performance are in focus. Cloud services generally equip enterprises with advanced and secure functionalities to achieve their business goals. These functionalities are pre-enabled with comprehensive monitoring capabilities but are limited and do not scale with microservices.
What is Microservices Monitoring?
Microservices monitoring is an approach embedded with strategies and methodologies to extract unparalleled visibility into microservices at scale. The compute instance, microservice module, dependencies, communications, behaviors, and responses are important to be monitored. The level of monitoring is a multiplying factor that changes with the microservices.
In the cloud realm, generic monitoring requirements can soon become inefficient and overwhelming. Microservices need extra focus and attention to craft dynamic and customizable monitoring implementations. Let us explore microservices monitoring strategies that Dev/Sec/Ops teams should consider.
5 Cloud Strategies for Microservices Monitoring
Implementing monitoring solutions for cloud-based workloads has evolved drastically over time. Usually, implementing monitoring using the existing toolset delivers expected outcomes, but these implementations lack scalability and are not necessarily dynamic. Generic solutions fall short when microservices are involved on a vast cloud terrain, and advanced strategies are required to address microservices on the cloud. Let’s look at five key strategies:
Adopt Open-Source to Develop Dynamic Templates
Cloud-native solutions should be the first choice when implementing monitoring capabilities. Cloud-native offerings provide seamless integrations with internal services, making the implementation easy and secure. Small-scale applications where microservices are deployed in manageable chunks should utilize in-built offerings. Although flexible, dynamic, and inbuilt, they don’t scale and perform optimally when managing microservices handling large-scale workloads.
Open-source solutions have come a long way. They offer community-driven, requirement and problem-specific solutions. Microservices require repetitive monitoring implementations with different configurations. Including dynamic templates that can be modulated during runtime as microservices monitoring is a sound strategy. Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It offers a powerful querying language with multidimensional data modeling capabilities. It also helps collect metrics from various sources through dynamic label-based queries and configurations for flexible monitoring.
Implement Secure Network Policies
Every development and deployment activity is centered around security-first principles. Cloud-based applications operate and communicate over the network, and therefore, every exchange should comply with security standards. Network policies are an optimal means to ensure all cloud components are operating in agreement with the set rules.
Enforcing rules between microservices limits potential attack vectors and unauthorized external accesses. They provide an auditable framework for implementing network access controls that are essential for maintaining unparalleled security. Leveraging cloud-specific administrative tools for network management is a viable solution and should be part of the microservices monitoring strategy.
Implementing Custom Solutions to Aggregate Runtime Metrics
The metric collection is very important in assessing the behavior and performance of any logical operation. Accumulating metrics after the occurrence of an anomaly or completion of an event is not so useful when compared to runtime metrics. Standard metric collection abilities that cloud-native services deliver are not enough for microservices.
Out-of-the-box and custom solutions are needed to focus on integration or connection points between microservices. The custom solutions help monitor real-time anomalies while providing insights about resource utilization, overall health, and behavior of microservices. Open telemetry and Prometheus are viable choices while considering custom metric collection implementation as one of the microservices monitoring strategies.
Architect CI/CD Pipelines
Custom solutions, dynamic templates, and network policies are efficient only if they evolve with evolving requirements. Microservices operate and interact in a different way when compared to monolithic in-house applications. An activity or functionality is divided into smaller interdependent modules for deploying and managing them individually.
Typically, thousands of microservices are deployed, if not millions, at scale. Applying a singular solution that is custom and dynamic across all microservices is a complex task. Embedding new solutions and implementations into continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines (CI/CD pipelines) ensures uniformity while guaranteeing efficiency. CI/CD pipelines are extremely beneficial for cloud and microservices. While they are part of the modern stack, they should also be considered for microservices monitoring, if not done already.
Real-Time Dashboards with Detailed Status and Traces
Improvements are not possible without visibility, and monitoring does not fit into the equation without the same. An optimal use for accumulated logs and metrics is to present them on dashboards for detailed insights. The insights will flag bottlenecks while pushing for betterment.
Analyzing and streamlining the accumulated metrics in real-time delivers comprehensive dashboards with the status of microservices along with traces of failures, if any. The real-time capability helps enable debugging and implement remediation solutions based on trends. Eventually, performance, infrastructure reliability, network communications, and many other aspects concerning microservices can be visualized and improved using real-time dashboards.
Conclusion
Understanding how microservices are functioning and reacting to scaling workloads is crucial. Considering the complexities and penalties involved, monitoring microservices through extensive solutions while adopting custom and dynamic implementations is prudent. Cloud-based implementation should be equipped with sound microservices monitoring strategies. The strategies deliver real-time visibility with robust security, along with extensive flexibility.