AWS Marketplace

Simplify observability of Kubernetes clusters using the SolarWinds EKS add-on available in AWS Marketplace

As customers modernize their applications and deploy container workloads on Kubernetes (K8s) by integrating logs, metrics, and traces, businesses gain insights into how their container workloads are performing and how they interact with the rest of the technology environment. This integrated context is crucial for troubleshooting issues, understanding system performance, and making informed decisions that align with business objectives. Such context turns data into actionable insights that have business impact. Furthermore, consolidating observability of containers, applications, servers, databases, storage, and networks that span the cloud and on-premises is complex and time consuming.

Built on decades of experience helping IT professionals, SolarWinds has released the availability of the SolarWinds K8s Collector for SolarWinds Observability as an AWS Marketplace add-on for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). SolarWinds Observability is designed to provide a full-stack solution connecting multiple data points, modern, custom web applications, services, cloud-native, on-premises, hybrid infrastructures, and end-user experience. SolarWinds Observability eliminates tool sprawl, accelerates issue resolution, reduces alert fatigue, and catalyzes cloud modernization so your business has a consistent view of its digital operations. SolarWinds Observability’s AWS infrastructure and services monitoring helps you visualize container workload telemetry in business and technology contexts.

Solution overview

With this release, Amazon EKS customers can deploy the SolarWinds Observability EKS add-on for cluster observability. This post will show you how to subscribe to the SolarWinds Observability EKS add-on in AWS Marketplace without leaving the AWS Management Console for Amazon EKS. The following image shows a reference architecture for the solution; in this scenario, SolarWinds represents the vendor add-on.

AWS Marketplace EKS Add-on reference architecture

Figure 1: AWS Marketplace EKS Add-on reference architecture

An Amazon EKS user finds the SolarWinds EKS add-on in the Amazon EKS add-on catalog and subscribe using the new AWS Marketplace procurement widget while staying in the Amazon EKS console. Lifecycle management of these add-ons can be done using different methods including the UI of the Amazon EKS console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands, Amazon EKS API operations, and infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

Solution walkthrough

To get started, sign in to your AWS account with an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that has both IAM permissions to manage an EKS cluster and permissions to create and manage a subscription in AWS Marketplace. Make sure you have an active, healthy EKS cluster in your AWS account. Find, subscribe to, and deploy SolarWinds Observability K8s Collector from the Amazon EKS add-on catalog using the following steps:

1. Copy or create an API token (Ingestion type), found in the settings area of SolarWinds Observability.

2. Create a namespace where the SolarWinds Observability Kubernetes Collector will be deployed:

kubectl create namespace solarwinds

3. Create a kubectl secret with the following command, replacing <YourApiToken> with the API token from the previous step:

kubectl create secret generic solarwinds-api-token -n solarwinds --from-literal=SOLARWINDS_API_TOKEN=<YourApiToken>

4. Navigate to the EKS console and select an existing cluster from the list. Select the Add-ons on the right side of the Add-ons section and choose Get more add-ons on the top-right corner.

AWS EKS cluster add-ons

Figure 2: AWS EKS cluster add-ons

5. Scroll down to AWS Marketplace add-ons, and in the vendor search box, enter SolarWinds.

AWS EKS add-on search in AWS Marketplace

Figure 3: AWS EKS add-on search in AWS Marketplace

6. In the upper right corner of the SolarWinds Observability K8 Collector distribution box, select the check box. Then choose Next.

7. On the Configure selected add-on settings page, for Version choose the latest version.

8. Choose Optional configuration settings and provide the required Configuration values:

otel:
     endpoint: otel.collector.na-01.cloud.solarwinds.com:443
cluster:
     name: my-aws-eks-cluster
     uid: my-aws-eks-cluster

9. If you have an active subscription of the product, the status shows as Ready to install. To continue, choose Next and skip to Step 12. If you don’t yet have an active subscription, proceed to Step 10.

Note: If you don’t have an active subscription for the product, the status is displayed as Requires subscription.

AWS EKS add-on configuration

Figure 4: AWS EKS add-on configuration

10. To display the inline procurement widget, select the View subscription options.

SolarWinds EKS add-on subscription agreement

Figure 5: SolarWinds EKS add-on subscription agreement

11. In the procurement widget, you can view available offers for the product from AWS Marketplace. You can select the offers to display pricing information and end user license agreement (EULA). Confirm the details and choose Subscribe. This process takes a few minutes. When complete, a green banner will appear at the top. Choose Next.

12. To deploy the add-on into the EKS cluster, review the add-on details and choose Create. Check the status of the add-on deployment in the main cluster information page under the Add-ons tab. Choose View subscription for the AWS Marketplace subscription agreement details.

SolarWinds EKS add-on review and add

Figure 6: SolarWinds EKS add-on review and add

1. Check the pods running on your EKS cluster under the solarwinds namespace using the kubectl utility.

kubectl get all --namespace solarwinds

Clean up

To remove the SolarWinds K8s Collector add-on from the cluster, follow these steps.

From the Amazon EKS console:

1. Sign in to the console and navigate to Amazon EKS.

2. Navigate to your EKS cluster and choose Add-ons.

3. Search for the add-on using the keyword SolarWinds and select the SolarWinds SWO K8s Collector add-on. Then on the top of the right corner of the add-ons tab, choose Remove.

4. Follow the on-screen instructions to delete the add-on from the cluster.

From the AWS CLI:

1. helm uninstall solarwinds --namespace solarwinds

2. kubectl delete secret solarwinds-api-token -n solarwinds

To unsubscribe from the SolarWinds add-on software from AWS Marketplace, follow these steps.

1. Sign in to the console and navigate to AWS Marketplace.

2. Search for SolarWinds in your AWS Marketplace subscriptions. Choose Manage.

3. On the SWO K8s Collector add-on subscription page, for Actions, choose Cancel Subscription.

4. Follow the on-screen instructions to delete the AWS Marketplace subscription for the SolarWinds K8s add-on.

SolarWinds Observability

SolarWinds Observability main dashboard

Figure 7: SolarWinds Observability main dashboard

SolarWinds Observability’s auto-instrumented, real-time Kubernetes monitoring capabilities enable you to monitor cluster state and improve system performance. SolarWinds Observability monitors the availability and performance of your Kubernetes environment along with the applications deployed on them and delivers an integrated view for comprehensive analysis and troubleshooting.

It provides unified, out-of-the-box, and customized dashboards and charts designed to provide a holistic view of your Kubernetes environment. The dashboards are interactive and allow you to filter and drill down into the underlying data.

  • Gain insight into metrics, including key information regarding cluster health and performance, pod performance and management, and node metrics for performance and resource management.
  • Filter them by deployment metrics, so you view metrics across all deployments or drill down to specific instances for granular assessment.
  • Benefit from increased visibility into node metrics so you see where to deploy pods and how to redistribute them to optimize Kubernetes resources and performance.
  • Also, SolarWinds K8s Observability provides a capability to continuously auto-discover the workloads running in customers’ EKS clusters and collects the necessary metrics, alerts, and logs from those pods and services and provides a single pane of glass view on them inside the SolarWinds K8s Observability.

In addition to monitoring Kubernetes performance over time, SolarWinds Observability provides real-time monitoring to help identify immediate problems. This allows for fast and accurate troubleshooting of Kubernetes resource and deployment issues.

  • Gain visibility into real-time issues such as suboptimal deployments with detailed cluster metric views to track performance of replica sets and network resources.
  • When components experience problems, use automated alerting thresholds to help identify emerging issues and minimize downtime.

SolarWinds EKS cluster dashboard

Figure 8: SolarWinds EKS cluster dashboard

  • Track Kubernetes cluster health and stability across a range of application components, including services, nodes, containers, and load balancers.
  • Understand Kubernetes cluster health across component dependencies viewed as a system graph.

SolarWinds Observability system graph

Figure 9: SolarWinds Observability system graph

“SolarWinds is excited to announce the release of our SolarWinds Observability Kubernetes Collector in the AWS Marketplace. This integration makes it easier than ever for organizations to leverage SolarWinds Observability to gain comprehensive visibility into their Kubernetes environments running on AWS. By combining the power of SolarWinds Observability with the scalability and convenience of AWS, organizations can quickly identify and resolve issues, optimize performance, and ensure the availability of their critical applications,” said Sai Krishna, SVP of Technology and Engineering at SolarWinds.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we showed how to discover, subscribe to, and deploy the SolarWinds Observability Kubernetes Collector add-on into your Amazon EKS cluster. You can deploy the add-on without leaving the console and quickly add observability capabilities to your container workload running on EKS clusters. Visit SolarWinds EKS add-on in AWS Marketplace for more details. For more information about SolarWinds and SolarWinds Observability, visit the SolarWinds website.

If you have AWS Marketplace questions and need assistance, contact AWS Support or email aws-mp-eks@amazon.com.

References

About the authors

Jaroslav Fedor

Jaroslav Fedor

Jaroslav Fedor is a Senior Engineering Manager at SolarWinds, where he leads the engineering efforts for Kubernetes monitoring within the SolarWinds Observability product, leveraging his background in SRE and DevOps. In his free time, Jaroslav enjoys riding his motorcycle, playing ice hockey and floorball, but he values spending most of his time with his family.

Peter Stranak

Peter Stranak

Peter Stranak is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at SolarWinds and works on the SolarWinds Observability product, specifically Kubernetes monitoring. Before that he spent several years working on on-prem products such as the SolarWinds Orion Platform. For relaxation, he enjoys light hiking or a good book.

Bishr Tabbaa

Bishr Tabbaa

Bishr Tabbaa is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. Bishr specializes in helping customers with machine learning, security, and observability applications. Outside of work, he enjoys playing tennis, cooking, and spending time with family.

Jay Chandrasekar

Jay Chandrasekar

Jay Chandrasekar is a Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services. Jay focuses on risk management with his customers with a special interest in Security and Resilience topics. Outside of work, Jay enjoys catching up on movies and spending time with his family.

Chris Bohn

Chris Bohn

Chris Bohn is an Account Manager at Amazon Web Services. Chris strives to help customers achieve their business objectives by leveraging best-in-class technology. Outside of work, Chris enjoys the active and vibrant city life of Austin with his family and friends.

Wendy Sikirat

Wendy Sikirat Jabitta

Wendy Sikirat Jabitta is an ISV Solutions Program Manager with AWS Marketplace. Wendy works with AWS technology partners to build integrated solutions that offer more visibility to their products and enable ease of deployment by customers. In her free time, Wendy enjoys wellness and fitness activities, as well as participating in fitness competitions.