Kubernetes control plane monitoring
The Kubernetes control plane is the brain of a cluster, orchestrating workloads and managing cluster operations. Monitoring it helps detect bottlenecks, avoid failures, and ensure smooth performance. Site24x7 offers deep visibility into control plane components to keep your cluster stable and efficient.
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Why monitor the control plane?
The Kubernetes control plane is made up of several components, including the API server, the scheduler, the controller manager, etcd, and the cloud-controller-manager (for cloud-based clusters). Failures or performance degradation in any of these can severely impact your entire Kubernetes environment.
Site24x7 helps you
- Detect API server slowness or unavailability.
- Track scheduler latency and resource contention.
- Monitor etcd health, disk latency, and the quorum status.
- Get alerted to controller manager failures or stuck sync loops.
- Observe event patterns for recurring issues across clusters.
Monitoring the control plane in Kubernetes is not optional—it's foundational.
Key components to monitor
Site24x7 captures live operational data from all major Kubernetes control plane components to help you detect early signs of failures, performance bottlenecks, or configuration issues.
The API server
The request rate, latency, and errors
Track the number of API requests per second, response times, and error ratios.
The success vs. failure rate
Monitor the percentage of successful versus failed API calls to assess overall reliability.
Throttling and authentication failures
Detect rate limiting events and issues with user or service authentication.
The scheduler
Pod scheduling latency
Measure the time it takes to bind pods to suitable nodes.
Scheduling failures and pending pods
Identify pods stuck in the pending state due to resource or affinity constraints.
Resource allocation metrics
Evaluate scheduling efficiency based on the node capacity and resource requests.
The controller manager
Sync and control loop frequency
Track how often reconciliation loops are executed across resources.
Reconciliation errors
Detect when the actual cluster state diverges from the desired state.
Event-driven deployment anomalies
Discover failures or inconsistencies in deployments, ReplicaSets, and DaemonSets.
etcd
Health and data consistency
Monitor etcd's overall health, including cluster consistency checks.
Disk I/O and fsync latency
Track write performance to ensure low-latency persistence.
The quorum state and availability
Detect member failures or split-brain scenarios that affect consensus.
The cloud-controller-manager
Node life cycle sync issues
Identify delays or failures in syncing the node status from the cloud provider.
Persistent Volume provisioning errors
Monitor automatic volume attachment and creation across nodes.
LoadBalancer allocation metrics
Track the service provisioning status and external IP allocation delays.
Visualize control plane health in 1 view
With Site24x7's dynamic dashboards and AI-driven alerting, you can quickly visualize control plane behavior across environments. Drill down from symptoms to the root cause, whether it's a slow etcd write or an overwhelmed API server.
Our topology-aware insights help you trace issues from the control plane to the workloads they affect, bridging the gap between infrastructure and application performance.
Benefits of Kubernetes control plane monitoring with Site24x7
Site24x7 delivers a purpose-built monitoring experience for the kube-proxy in Kubernetes, ensuring critical networking insights without the complexity.
Proactive anomaly
detection with dynamic baselining
Centralized dashboards for multi-cluster control plane health monitoring
Correlated events and metric views, for faster root cause analysis
No blind spots—monitoring of managed and self-hosted control planes alike
Stay in control of your control plane
Don't wait for your cluster to break. With Site24x7's Kubernetes control plane monitoring, you gain clarity into the operational heart of Kubernetes, helping you optimize performance, improve reliability, and support seamless scaling. Start monitoring your Kubernetes control plane with Site24x7 today.
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