Resource Live Insights & Operations

The Live tab offers real-time insights and management capabilities for your cloud resources. It provides a comprehensive view of pipeline activities, Kubernetes workloads, Terraform outputs, and monitoring dashboards.

Use Cases

• Real-Time Monitoring: Observe live deployment statuses and resource metrics to ensure system health and performance.
• Deployment Management: Oversee and control deployment pipelines, including version rollbacks and promotions.
• Kubernetes Operations: Manage Kubernetes workloads with actions like rolling restarts and scaling adjustments.
• Infrastructure Outputs Access: Retrieve and utilise Terraform outputs for seamless integration and configuration.
• Resource Monitoring: Utilise Grafana-powered dashboards to monitor CPU usage, memory consumption, and pod restarts.

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Functionalities

1. Pipeline Activity

This section displays the current state and version history segmented into:

• Build Registered: Tracks the changes to the artifact being deployed.
• Blueprint Activity: Monitors changes and deployments related to the blueprint configurations.
• Override Activity: Logs modifications applied to the resources as overrides.

Each category presents:

• Live Version: The version currently deployed.
• Release Pending Version: The version queued for deployment.
• Version History: An expandable table detailing past versions with timestamps and statuses.

The Version History table includes a rollback feature, allowing you to revert to a specific version if necessary.

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2. Kubernetes Dashboard

This dashboard offers a live overview of your Kubernetes cluster, covering:

• Workloads:

  • Pods: Displays status, age, restarts, readiness, and available actions.
  • Deployments, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, CronJobs, Jobs: Provides insights into the state and performance of various controllers and jobs.

• Storage:

  • Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) and Persistent Volumes (PVs): Shows storage allocations, statuses, and capacities.

• Autoscaling:

  • Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPAs): Monitors scaling activities and metrics.

For Pods, the following actions are available:

• Rolling Restart: Gracefully restarts pods to apply updates or recover from issues.
• Refresh: Updates the pod list to reflect the current state.

Where the resource is managed by an Argo Rollout, two further actions are available. Both act on the rollout as a whole, not on an individual pod:

• Promote: Graduates the canary or preview version to stable and scales down the previous stable pod set (Argo Rollouts blue-green and canary strategies).
• Abort: Stops the rollout in progress and scales the canary pod set down, leaving the previous stable version serving traffic.

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3. Terraform Outputs

This section displays the outputs from your Terraform configurations, including:

• Interfaces: Endpoints or connection details exposed by your resources.
• Attributes: Key-value pairs representing resource properties.

Each output offers action buttons to copy names and dollar references ($refs) for seamless integration into your configurations.

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4. Monitoring Dashboards

Real-time monitoring is facilitated through Grafana-powered dashboards, featuring:

• CPU Usage: Visualizes CPU consumption across your resources.
• Memory Usage: Tracks memory allocation and usage patterns.
• Pod Restarts: Monitors the frequency and reasons for pod restarts, aiding in troubleshooting.

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5. Additional Dashboards

Depending on the selected resource type, additional dashboards may include:

• Ingress Overview: Details traffic routing, load balancing, and external access points.
• Historical Logs: Provides access to past logs for auditing and debugging purposes.

These dashboards adapt based on the resource type selected, ensuring relevant information is presented for effective management.

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FAQs

Q1: How can I perform a rollback to a previous version?

Navigate to the Pipeline Activity section, expand the Version History table, and select the desired version to revert to using the rollback mechanism.

Q2: What actions are available for managing pods?

In the Kubernetes Dashboard, you can perform actions such as Rolling Restart, Refresh, Promote, and Abort.

Q3: What monitoring metrics are available?

The Monitoring Dashboards provide metrics on CPU Usage, Memory Usage, and Pod Restarts, visualized through Grafana dashboards.

Q4: Are the dashboards customizable?

Dashboards are tailored based on the selected resource type, ensuring relevant information is displayed for effective management.

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Troubleshooting

Issue: Changes are not reflecting in the Kubernetes Dashboard.

• Solution: Ensure you have clicked the Refresh action to update the pod list. If the issue persists, verify your Kubernetes cluster's connectivity and health.

Issue: Unable to perform a rollback to a previous version.

• Solution: Confirm that the desired version is listed in the Version History. If it's unavailable, the version may not be eligible for rollback.

Issue: Terraform outputs are not displaying correctly.

• Solution: Check that your Terraform configurations have been applied successfully. Re-run the Terraform apply process if necessary and refresh the Live tab.