Itzikr's Blog

Few weeks ago, I blogged about ‘Project Karavi” which you can read about here

Project Karavi aims at improving the observability, usability, and data mobility for stateful applications with Dell Technologies Storage portfolio. Project Karavi together with the CSI plugins and the pioneering app-aware, app-consistent backup and recovery solutions form the most comprehensive enterprise-grade Storage and Data Protection solutions for Kubernetes from Dell Technologies.

This Karavi Observability project provides Kubernetes administrators insight into CSI (Container Storage Interface) Driver persistent storage topology, usage, and performance. Metrics data is collected and pushed to the OpenTelemetry Collector, so it can be processed, and exported in a format consumable by Prometheus. Topology data related to containerized volumes that are provisioned by a CSI (Container Storage Interface) Driver is also captured. The metrics and topology data are visualized through Grafana dashboards. SSL certificates for TLS between nodes are handled by cert-manager.

What’s new in 0.2.0?

Karavi Observability 0.2.0 consists of:

• Establishing a new identity for Karavi Observability (https://github.com/dell/karavi-observability).
  
• OpenShift 4.5/4.6 support (via helm).
  
• Consolidating the helm charts into a single karavi-observability helm chart.
  
• Simplifying cert generation and management.
  

Karavi Observability Capabilities

• Storage Pool Consumption By CSI Driver
  
• Storage System I/O Performance By Kubernetes Node
  
• CSI Driver Provisioned Volume I/O Performance
  
• CSI Driver Provisioned Volume Topology
  

Supported Platforms

The following matrix provides a list of all supported versions for each Dell EMC Storage product.

CSI Drivers

Karavi Observability supports the following CSI drivers and versions.

TLS Encryption

The Karavi Observability helm deployment relies on cert-manager to manage SSL certificates that are used to encrypt communication between various components. When installing using the karavi-observability helm chart, cert-manager is installed and configured automatically. The cert-manager components listed below will be installed alongside karavi-observability.

If desired, you may provide your own certificate key pair to be used inside the cluster by providing the path to the certificate and key in the helm chart config. If you do not provide a certificate, one will be generated for you on installation.

Below, you can see a demo of cloud-native application & database storage performance monitoring, both running on Openshift 4.6 cluster and connected to Dell EMC PowerFlex storage.

Together with the new PowerFlex HTLM5 UI, Karavi Observability provides end to end performance monitoring solution for Kubernetes cloud-native applications running on PowerFlex, from the PowerFlex storage building blocks – to the application persistent volumes.

For more information:

Official GitHub Page https://github.com/dell/karavi/

Dell Container Community : https://www.dell.com/community/Containers/bd-p/Containers