Biography

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for over ten years, Philipp is now working as a developer advocate at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in Vienna, Austria, he is constantly traveling Europe and beyond to speak and discuss open source software, search, databases, infrastructure, and security.

Workshop

Live Kubernetes Debugging with the Elastic Stack

Your Kubernetes app is down. Your users start ranting on Twitter. Your boss is standing right behind you. What do you do?

This workshop walks you through a live debugging session without panicking:

• What do your health checks say?
• Where does your monitoring point you?
• Can you get more details from your application’s traces?
• Is there anything helpful in the logs?
• What the heck is even deployed?

We are using the Elastic Stack in this demo with a special focus on its Kubernetes integration with metadata enrichment and autodiscovery in combination with APM / tracing, metrics, logs, and health checks.

Agenda

• Part 1: Intro to monitoring / observability and the Elastic Stack:
  • What is monitoring or observability
  • Where does the Elastic Stack come into play and how has it evolved from full-text search to logs and then to metrics plus traces
• Part 2: Hands-on with Beats
  • Getting our application up and running on Kubernetes
  • What different Beats are available and what use-cases do they cover
  • How to roll out Beats on Kubernetes
  • Monitoring the collected data in Kibana
  • Logging and metrics best practices
• Part 3: Hands-on with Traces
  • What is (distributed) tracing
  • How to get started with the Elastic APM agents
  • Finding trouble in your traces through Kibana
  • Combining traces with logs, metrics, and health checks
• Part 4: Conclusion and Q&A

• Get familiar with current thinking behind monitoring.
• See how metrics, logs and traces flow together to help troubleshooting.
• Walk away with solid idea of how to troubleshoot a real problem using free tools.

The target audience includes those interested in running (micro-) services on Kubernetes (or also without). You should already have some experience with Docker and Kubernetes, since we are only focussing on the monitoring aspect.

– Installations:

            – We are running workshops through https://strigo.io/, and the only thing we need is a browser and a stable internet connection; though we don’t need a lot of bandwidth.

– Technical knowledge:

           – Basic Docker and Kubernetes knowledge. Nothing spectacular though and if you are a little rusty with some concepts we will clear those up along the way.