From k9s to OpenTelemetry: A guide to observability for your Spring Boot apps in K8s

Matthias Haeussler - Novatec Consulting

One of the biggest challenges in the context of observing Spring Boot apps in Kubernetes is to find the right technology for the desired level of introspection. This talk will give an overview of what is currently available, what it gives you and which overhead you need to expect.

Spring Boot is designed to be particularly developer friendly and intuitive, understanding Kubernetes however can be hard. Not only in the initial learning and understanding of the concepts, but also the aspect of keeping an overview of what is happening inside at the workloads of the cluster can be challenging. How can you quickly and easily tell if your apps are healthy, well utilised and running fine?

This talk intends to look at the various aspects of Kubernetes observability and to introduce and compares multiple Open Source tools to achieve that. The range of tools covers different observability levels and requirements of different user groups.

It starts with tools simply querying the Kubernetes API and delivering the outputs in an easy-to-understand UI, goes over the possibilities of services meshes and ends with application-side logging and monitoring. For each level of observability the user has to pay a certain price in terms of configuration and runtime overhead. In turn the quality and depth of the information is different.

The Spring ecosystem provides the Spring Cloud Kubernetes extension. This talk will also highlight how this improves the Kubernetes experience and how it integrates with other solutions.

The intended take-away is to get a feeling which type of tooling is the right one for a given purpose. Most options will be shown in a live demonstration. Some of the technologies have a polyglot aspect and can be applied independent of the framework. This talk however has a dominant focus on Spring Boot applications.