Let’s be honest, working with Kubernetes (K8s) has never been the easiest tech to work with. As a seasoned Kubernetes professional, I find myself constantly looking for ways to set up collecting data from my clusters, only to find out that there is a new, more complicated way to get the data I’m looking for.

This reminds me of an old Seinfeld episode titled “The Parking Garage.” It’s one of the best analogies I could come up with when working with Kubernetes. In the episode, the main characters park their car in a garage and come back hours later only to find out they have no idea where they parked their car. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of setting up, deploying, and instrumenting a K8s cluster, you know precisely how the feelings of confusion, anger, and self-doubt can materialize, just like losing your car in a parking garage. I’m here to introduce a simpler way to collect, route, and transform your data out of your K8s cluster without all the toil.

Challenges of Instrumenting Kubernetes

• Complexity: Kubernetes is a complex system with many different components. This can make it difficult to know where to start instrumenting and what metrics and logs to collect.
• Variety in Instrumentation Methods: Kubernetes has many different ways to instrument it, including using native K8s metrics and logs, or you can use third-party tools. While this variety is beneficial, too many options can make it challenging to choose the right approach for your needs.
• High Data Volume: Kubernetes generates a lot of data making it tough to store and process all of the data effectively.

Why Cribl Edge on EKS

Amazon released Add-on for EKS last year at re:Invent, but have now expanded it and simplified the process for subscribing to new Add-ons in Marketplace. This means it’s easier than ever for you to get started with Cribl Edge through AWS Marketplace. With Edge now available as an Add-On for EKS through AWS Marketplace, customers can seamlessly deploy Cribl Edge on their EKS cluster and quickly collect, transform, and route their data to any destination. This frees users from having to deploy multiple collectors or agents on their cluster just to route data to one specific solution.

Imagine sharing logs with your security team without having to instrument another agent to collect and send that data to them. Maybe you want to try a different Observability product for your metrics and traces. Cribl Edge gives you the freedom to send the data to multiple destinations and make a true apples-to-apples comparison between the platforms.

How Cribl Edge Can Help

Cribl Edge simplifies the process of instrumenting Kubernetes. It collects, reduces, enriches, normalizes, and routes data from your Linux and Windows machines, apps, microservices, and more to any desired destination. Edge provides pre-built connectors for Kubernetes metrics and logs, and it can also collect data from other sources, such as applications, infrastructure, and security systems.

Once Cribl Edge collects the data, it excels in optimizing data volume. Edge filters out noise and aggregates data for smart reduction and more actionable insights. From there, Edge can enrich the data with additional context — such as hostnames, timestamps, and application tags — before routing the data to any destination, like a data warehouse, Elasticsearch, or Splunk, for analysis.

Cribl.Cloud enables you to leverage Cribl Stream and Edge, while adding the ability for organizations to manage fleets of Cribl Edge nodes from one location. Data can either flow directly from the Cribl Edge node, or it can be routed through Cribl Stream to perform additional tasks like enriching, masking, optimizing, or aggregating events. Customers can mask PII or other sensitive information prior to sending it into their monitoring solution or data lakes. Plus, teams can collaborate and share metrics, trace, and log data within access and policy limits across multiple platforms.

Summary: Ease K8s Instrumentation with Cribl Edge

Cribl Edge can help you simplify the process of instrumenting Kubernetes by providing a single solution for collecting, reducing, enriching, normalizing, and routing data to any destination. With Cribl Edge, you can avoid the frustration and confusion of getting lost in the parking garage of Kubernetes instrumentation.

This is just the beginning of what you can do with Cribl Edge on EKS. To see more features and capabilities, visit our website. We are excited for you to try our products by giving you free training and sandboxes so you can use the product without having to deploy it in your own environment. There is even a specific Cribl Edge Sandbox you can use today. Check out the Setup Guide on our documentation page for Cribl Edge on how to set it up in your EKS cluster.

Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, empowers organizations to transform their data strategy. Customers use Cribl’s suite of products to collect, process, route, and analyze all IT and security data, delivering the flexibility, choice, and control required to adapt to their ever-changing needs.

We offer free training, certifications, and a free tier across our products. Our community Slack features Cribl engineers, partners, and customers who can answer your questions as you get started and continue to build and evolve. We also offer a variety of hands-on Sandboxes for those interested in how companies globally leverage our products for their data challenges.