Mitigate the Complexity of Kubernetes Operations with Rancher Prime and Asserts

SUSE guest blog authored by:

Steve Waterworth, The Mechanic at Asserts

Kubernetes (K8s) has continued to explode in popularity with everyone from small startups to large multinational corporations running their business-critical applications on it. Along with the plethora of benefits, K8s comes with a high degree of complexity when it comes to implementing, managing, and monitoring the platform. Luckily, along with K8s exploding popularity, there has also been tremendous growth in Kubernetes management platforms and Observability tools designed specifically for these complex environments. 

Managing Kubernetes with Rancher Prime Kubernetes Management Platform

Rancher Prime enables customers to run K8s across any infrastructure in production. As the open-source enterprise platform for Kubernetes management, Rancher helps ITOps address the operational and security challenges of managing certified Kubernetes clusters from the core, cloud, and at the edge. It also provides DevOps teams with integrated tools for building and running containerized workloads at scale, making Kubernetes management simpler and more efficient.

Monitoring Kubernetes Deployments on Rancher with Asserts

The dynamic nature of K8s deployments makes monitoring through complexity a significant challenge. Prometheus has become the de facto standard for monitoring these complex, cloud-native environments. 

ITOps and DevOps teams are now able to use Asserts alongside Rancher Prime to gain a layer of automation and intelligence on top of their existing Prometheus ecosystem. Asserts analyzes the existing metric data to build a correlation graph, automatically detect anomalies and failures, track SLOs, and direct users to the root cause of any issue. This unique correlation graph automatically creates and ranks ‘Assertions’, a collection of interconnected issues, directing DevOps teams on where to prioritize their remediation efforts. From Assertions, users can dive directly into dynamically curated Grafana dashboards, relevant log lines, and traces in their existing open observability data systems to quickly pinpoint issues. 

Unlike traditional application performance monitoring solutions, Asserts does not require a proprietary agent. This means users can keep full control of their data, avoid vendor lock-in, and maximize their OSS investment, without the need to pay for duplicate storage.

As the leading unified, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and platform-agnostic management tool in the industry, Rancher Prime simplifies K8s management by delivering streamlined cluster operations, full visibility and monitoring, and unified security and governance. Rancher Prime consolidates a host of K8s functionalities under one platform, to essentially serve as a one-stop-shop for building, deploying, and scaling containerized applications, including packaging, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and service mesh.

Together Rancher Prime and Asserts combine to mitigate the complexity of K8s operations by offering a simple and consistent way to provision, manage versions, gain visibility and diagnostics, set up monitoring, alerting, and SLOs, automate processes and enforce user access and security policies across clusters.

To learn more about how Asserts and Rancher Prime can help you adopt and master K8s, visit our website for more information or get in touch with the Asserts team. You can also contact the Rancher Prime team.

Author: Steve Waterworth

Steve is The Mechanic at Asserts, which provides a layer of automation and intelligence on top of Prometheus. He brings a wealth of experience to this role having worked in technical positions in the APM space since 2004 for companies including Wily Technology, AppDynamics and Instana. In that time he has seen numerous technical revolutions and market disruptions giving him unique insight into the rapidly changing world of Observability. He has a background in electronics and programming before moving to software solutions.