Observe your Kubernetes clusters in minutes … Getting Started with SUSE Cloud Observability on AWS

Getting Started

It’s great to see so many of you checking out SUSE Cloud Observability on the AWS Marketplace. We’ve heard that a lot of you are interested in learning more about how to get started, especially how easy it is to get on-boarded. We’ve put together this blog to walk you through the process of connecting your clusters and gaining visibility into your environment in just a few minutes. 

You’ll see that with features like real-time insights, comprehensive dashboards and automated dependency mapping, it’s straightforward to troubleshoot issues, optimize performance and maintain reliability across your Kubernetes deployments. 

When you purchase SUSE Cloud Observability through the AWS Marketplace, the setup of your environment happens automatically. You will receive an email from SUSE with the required login details and links to your environment.  There are 3 key steps to follow:

1. Setup a password
2. Login to your SUSE Cloud Observability Instance
3. Install the SUSE Observability agent to your cluster

Setup a password

The first step to getting observed data is to set up your initial password.  The email from SUSE Cloud Observability contains a unique link which allows you to set this for your account. As you would expect, this must be performed before you can login and configure the observability environment, you also have the option to set up 2FA if needed afterwards.

Accessing your SUSE Observability Environment

Once the password is set, login in to your SUSE Cloud Observability environment, again there is a unique customer link in the on-boarding email.

Install the SUSE Observability agent to your Kubernetes cluster

OK, so here is where things start to get interesting.  SUSE Cloud Observability uses StackPacks (a type of plug-in)  in order to make it easier to configure your downstream clusters and get data into the observability environment.  There are StackPacks for many different types of Kubernetes clusters.  Initially you should be taken to the the SUSE Observability UI, open the main menu by clicking in the top left of the screen and go to `StackPacks` > `Kubernetes`, or choose from one of the packs if you find yourself on the screen below.

At this point you will need to enter a name for the Kubernetes cluster you want to observe, whilst the name you enter doesn’t have to exactly match the cluster name in the kubeconfig file, it’s good to have some standards in place for naming.

Once you click install, the cluster will show itself in the UI as ‘waiting for data’

Clicking on the cluster name will reveal information on how to onboard a variety of clusters, from Rancher Kubernetes Engine, to Amazon EKS and many others in between.

Run the displayed commands on your Kubernetes cluster.  Don’t forget to take a quick look at the prerequisites, i.e. to onboard an Amazon EKS cluster, we need to a user with additional permissions in the cluster, and for all observed clusters we need port 443 outbound connectivity to the SUSE Cloud Observability platform.

After the the cluster has been connected, there should be a green tick in the SUSE Cloud Observability UI and it’s at this point you can start exploring your cluster data.

Total time,: 3 Minutes!

Explore your data

To start exploring your data, open the main menu by clicking in the top left of the screen and go to `Kubernetes` to reveal a list of observable items.

Select ‘Clusters’ from the infrastructure section which should show a list of monitored clusters, select your cluster to reveal one of the many built in views.

At this point you can start exploring the data for your cluster or add more clusters from which to gather data.

Additional Information

By purchasing through the AWS Marketplace, you can take advantage of simplified purchasing, flexible pay-as-you-go pricing and a fully managed SaaS solution. Take a look at our listings on the AWS Marketplace to get started.

For further information on how to use SUSE Cloud Observability, including creating custom views please see the SUSE Observability documentation.