Skip to content

Source Pixabay.com

Taikun’s way to monitor and report metrics of apps and users in Kubernetes

Kubernetes makes it extremely easy to dynamically provision infrastructure resources. It provides a set of APIs that can be triggered by teams to build new clusters or replicate old ones.

Any large cloud infrastructure would be hosting K8s for multiple tenants (or teams) in the organisation. With APIs to dynamically provision such resources, it can quickly blow up resource consumption and exponentially increase costs.

The advantage of an auto-scaling architecture in Kubernetes and the ability to programmatically provision expensive resources like GPU on the cloud can increase the risk of overspending and under-optimizing compute resources.

Often, development teams facing deadline pressures, use and forget to destroy unused resources. Memory leak bugs or inefficient code can also easily cause extraordinary consumption of infrastructure resources.

It is thus imperative that a cost monitoring solution is put in place. So that each team on the infrastructure knows how much it is consuming from the cloud infrastructure.

Like all other aspects of Kubernetes infrastructure management - Taikun can help you with it. Let us see how.

Taikun Showback & Chargeback

In Taikun, there are two ways in which efficient monitoring and reporting are done for the usage of apps and users - Showback and Chargeback. Let’s first understand how these two are different.

We know from our previous blogs that Taikun captures diverse metrics to monitor and report the usage of apps and users. Prometheus metrics can be accessed via queries from the Metrics tab in the Kubernetes server list.

Showback captures the resource usage by different users and apps within Taikun. Chargeback focuses on the Billing in an Organization. In both of them, rules can be defined to control the usage of compute resources and billing.

Let’s see how organisations can use Showback and Chargeback features in Taikun to manage resource usage and, consequently, improve their budget utilization.

Using Showback in Taikun

Showback in Taikun can be used to manage the maximum amount of resources that a project can use. The resource can be any Prometheus metric that is captured in the Taikun system.

Setting Showback rules

These are defined in the Showback Rules tab under the Manager section. We start by adding a Showback rule to capture and manage that metric.

We start with choosing the Organization in which we want to set the Showback rule. Some important fields in a Showback rule are as follows:

  • Name needs to be unique.
  • Metric Name is basically the metric we want to track and manage.
  • Kind is the field where we define where the data is coming from. Taikun gives us the ability to connect external data sources for more metrics. These are defined in another tab called Showback Credentials.
  • Type is the field where we tell Taikun how to count the metric. Is it a SUM like how many GBs were used or is it a COUNT like how many flavors of VMs are deployed.
  • Price field helps mention EURO/USD/CZK per unit of the metric.

Other fields define the Global and Project level limit for the metric and link a Showback credential to it if it is relevant. There is also an option to define our own variables in the form of labels.

You can read more about Showback rules here.

Adding Showback credentials

As mentioned earlier, if the metrics need to be collected from an external source - Showback Credential tab under Credentials section is where we define it.

It is pretty straightforward. We mark the Organization it is for, give it a Name and the credentials (URL, Username and password). That’s it.

Read more about Showback credentials here.

Showback Summary

Showback Summary tab under Manager is where all the magic happens. This page shows exactly which Rule is consuming how much of the budget. The page is updated at the beginning of every hour.

The collected data can be exported as a CSV file. There is also an option to send the report as an email (defined in My Profile tab of the user)

More details about Showback summary can be found in Taikun docs.

Chargeback in Taikun

Chargeback in Taikun is a way to control and manage the compute and infrastructure resources billing in an organisation. This is done by first defining Billing Rules in the Taikun Control Panel. Let’s see how it is done.

Billing rules and credentials

New budget rule for Organization is added under the Partner > Billing rule. Adding a new rule is straightforward.

Similar to adding a Showback Rule we discussed above, add the field details and choose the Organisation you want to apply the rule to. You have to also choose the Price Rate between 0% and 100%.

If you want to add new external data sources, you can add them under Billing Credential under the Credentials section. The process is similar to Showback credential.

Chargeback

The Chargeback tab under Billing is where all the summary gets saved. The data is shown in a tabular format and can be filtered on time.

Export to CSV and share via email option is available for this dashboard as well.

More about Taikun Chargeback here.

Usage reports

Another kind of report that Taikun provides is a Usage Report. This again can be found under the Billing section in the Taikun Dashboard.

A Usage Report in Taikun provides more granular data. With it, you can view how much compute and infrastructure resources have been utilized by each project.

The unit of measurement for it is TCU or Taikun Compute Unit. A Taikun Compute Unit is basically no. of CPUs used in the project + GB of RAM used in the project.

Read the docs to know more about Usage reports in Taikun.

Conclusion

Taikun’s Showback and Chargeback features have proven to be a game-changer for many Cloud management applications. With Showback rules and Billing rules in place, teams have become more confident in using autoscaling architecture without the risk of overshooting the company budgets.

These features help optimise the infrastructure resources and bring in a sense of accountability within teams using the Kubernetes setup.


Please contact us to explore Taikun in more detail and for a free consultation.

If you wish to try Taikun and see it in action, try our cloud solution here.

Back to top