Prevent Risk and Monitor Kubernetes with Fairwinds & Datadog
Written By: Kendall Miller
It can be challenging to get visibility into cloud applications. There’s so many data points distributed across environments related to servers, containers, databases, and other third-party services. All of that data needs monitoring. So how are you making your tech stack observable? At Fairwinds, we recommend all our Kubernetes managed service customers use Datadog to monitor applications and infrastructure to make your stack entirely observable, helping DevOps teams avoid downtime, resolve performance issues, and improve user experience. When you gain visibility into what’s actually happening, it becomes possible to react quickly to any issues and resolve them, increasing reliability.
That’s why we’ve worked hard to further our relationship with Datadog to make Fairwinds Insights — Kubernetes compliance, security, and policy software — available in the Datadog Marketplace. By doing so, Fairwinds prevents problems from entering the cluster, while Datadog identifies problems at runtime.
What does Datadog do?
Datadog seamlessly aggregates metrics and events across the full DevOps stack so you can see all of the information you need in one place. By providing insight into what’s happening across systems, apps, and services, your DevOps team is empowered to act quickly based on real-time information. Datadog delivers this observability through over 450 built-in integrations.
All of those integrations are what get your team full visibility into modern applications, which Datadog users use to improve performance, identify problems, and analyze logs. If it’s true (and I think it is) that what gets measured gets managed, it’s clear that Datadog can help you monitor, troubleshoot, optimize, and yes, manage the performance of your applications.
Fairwinds Insights adds proactive observability
While Datadog already offers visibility into the health and performance of a Kubernetes environment, when you add the Fairwinds Insights integration to your Datadog deployment, it adds focus on your Kubernetes cluster and helps you identify issues before they turn into an alarm going off in your Datadog dashboard.
Insights integrates into the CI/CD pipeline, identifying security, efficiency, and reliability misconfigurations before they get to your production environment. Insights can also apply Kubernetes best practice policies and enforce policies for compliance, helping you build and maintain a more secure, efficient, and reliable Kubernetes deployment even before you move your applications live and begin monitoring with Datadog.
Why Datadog and Fairwinds Insights
Datadog helps you monitor what’s happening, providing comprehensive visibility into modern applications and helping you analyze log data in context and monitor the user experience (and much more). Datadog offers great real-time monitoring and observability for reacting to system issues, so you know when something is going wrong. Essentially, it acts like a fire alarm, alerting you to what’s going wrong right now, and helps you fix it quickly and keep your customers happy.
Adding Fairwinds Insights to the mix helps you find out which configurations are risky or wasting resources. By integrating Insights into Datadog, you can find and prevent security and compliance risk in pre-production and identify misconfigurations that could be breaking your build. So the Insights integration acts more like a home inspector — it can’t prevent the fire alarm from going off, but it can reduce the likelihood that it will by resolving issues earlier in the process.
Add the Insights integration to get:
- End to end continuous monitoring for Kubernetes environments and cloud applications
- More reliable and efficient applications
- A single pane of glass that you already live in (the Datadog dashboard) that includes Fairwinds Insights alerts, warnings, and cost analysis
