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Container Observability deployment

Virtana Container Observability (CO) is a comprehensive monitoring platform purpose-built for Kubernetes and containerized environments. It provides unified visibility into metrics, logs, traces, and configuration events across your container infrastructure, all bundled into a single module with no additional charges for data ingest volume. CO delivers real-time insights into application performance, resource utilization, pod and node health, topology mapping, alerting with root cause analysis (RCA), and distributed tracing, which enables operations teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster.

Container Observability is a key pillar of the Virtana Platform, and deploying it is essential because:

  • Full-stack Kubernetes visibility: Monitor clusters, nodes, pods, containers, persistent volumes, services, and network flows across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premises (EKSA/vSphere) environments.

  • Integrated with Global View: CO feeds into the Virtana Global View dashboard, providing a single pane of glass across Container Observability and Infrastructure Observability.

  • North-South architecture: CO South agents are deployed on each Kubernetes node to collect metrics, logs, and traces at the host level. CO North backend services process, store, and serve this data. Shared Services provides the foundational data pipeline that both North and South depend on.

  • AI/ML and GPU workload support: Purpose-built to monitor GPU-optimized containers, including integration pathways with NVIDIA NGC deployments.

This section helps you deploy the CO shared services, frontend, backend, and South components, keep them current, and complete the post-installation setup.

Shared services deployment

Installs the shared data-pipeline services, such as Kafka, VictoriaMetrics, and the metrics APIs, that the CO frontend, backend, and South components all depend on. Deploy the shared services first, before you deploy any other CO component. See CO shared services deployment for details.

Frontend and backend deployment

Installs the CO frontend and backend with the virtana-co-controller Helm chart, using your tenant's organization ID and a shared input file. Deploy the frontend and backend after the shared services to serve the CO dashboards and process data from your monitored clusters. See CO frontend and backend deployment for details.

South deployment

Installs the CO South collectors into each Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster that you want to monitor. The collectors gather metrics, logs, and metadata and forward them to the CO backend. Deploy South components for every workload cluster that you want to observe. See CO south deployment for details.

Container Observability upgrade

Upgrades an existing CO deployment to the latest release in the required order: the shared services first, then the frontend and backend, and finally the South components. Upgrade CO whenever you upgrade the Virtana Platform. See CO upgrade for details.

Post-installation

Covers optional post-installation tasks that extend what CO collects, such as enabling distributed tracing and collecting logs from an external Splunk instance. After you deploy CO, enable the features that match the data that you want to bring in. See CO post installation for details.

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