Learn about monitoring applications deployed on Kubernetes using Oracle Management Cloud

Visibility into your application performance characteristics and operational data is a critical aspect of any cloud native deployment. You can integrate Oracle Application Performance Monitoring for your applications deployed on the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes to monitor the applications. However, you can use Oracle management Cloud with any Kubernetes cluster to achieve the same objective.

Oracle Application Performance Monitoring provides development and operations teams with the information that they need to quickly find and fix application issues. All your end-user and application performance information (with associated application logs) are brought together into Oracle Management Cloud's secure, unified big data platform.

Here, Java-based applications are used as an example.

Oracle Application Performance Monitoring works by adding a Java Agent to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which runs your application, and collecting metrics from the JVM. Oracle Application Performance Monitoring does this seamlessly, without any code changes to your application. It then sends this information over to the Oracle Management Cloud where you can analyze the information and create dashboards for application behavior and performance. In addition you can set up alerts. The communication with Oracle Application Performance Monitoring requires that the JVM to be registered with the cloud service.

In a cloud native environment, and especially when a scheduler like Kubernetes manages the container life cycle, the container that contains the JVM may be discarded and re-created for various reasons. So, you need a fully automated process to integrate Oracle Application Performance Monitoring with the application. You can accomplish this by integrating the registration process into the image creation step, so that you have an image that when "hydrated" into a container, can immediately and automatically reach out to Oracle Application Performance Monitoring and start delivering performance metrics. This gives you the ability to monitor your containerized applications as and when they are created, completely hands-free.

Architecture

This architecture shows how you can integrate Oracle Application Performance Monitoring with your applications deployed on the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes to monitor the applications.

Oracle Management Cloud is a suite of autonomous management services for monitoring, managing, and securing applications and infrastructure. A console provides a single user interface for all managed entities. Oracle Application Performance Monitoring is a cloud service that provides deep visibility into the performance of your web application.

The following architecture diagram illustrates how Oracle Application Performance agents deployed in an application container send application performance metrics through a virtual network to Oracle Management Cloud. End users log into the Oracle Management Cloud console to access the performance metrics and graphs in Oracle Application Performance Monitoring.

Description of the illustration omc-oke-architecture.png

About Required Services and Roles

This solution requires the following services and roles:

• A subscription to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (this gives you the ability to create instances of various services).

• An instance of Oracle Management Cloud - Enterprise Edition. Licensing is per entity.

• Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes

These are the roles needed for each service.

Service Name: Role	Required to...
OMCEXTERNAL_ENTITLEMENT_ADMINISTRATOR	Create Oracle Management Cloud instances. Assign Oracle Management Cloud instance roles to other users.
Oracle Management Cloud instance role privilege: OMC <instance name> Administrator	Add and enable entities for Oracle Management Cloud monitoring. Set up monitoring and analysis. Manage cloud agents. Configure alert rules. Delete entities. Disable notifications on alerts (during maintenance periods). View and monitor infrastructure status and performance.
Oracle Management Cloudinstance role privilege: OMC <instance name> User	View and monitor infrastructure status and performance. Receive alert notifications and view alerts. Select targets, groups, or systems to explore. Search and analyze logs. Save and share log searches. Build custom dashboards.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Service administrator role	Manage a specific Oracle Cloud service instance.

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