Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration and container management platform for automating deployment, scheduling, and update of your containerized workloads in distributed compute environments. It goes without saying that managing multiple nodes and applications in Kubernetes requires an efficient monitoring system. You need to have a real-time picture of events happening in your cluster to get actionable insights for optimization and improving performance. 

Kubernetes ships with some default monitoring and metrics solutions like Heapster and Kubernetes Metrics Server. However, in order to apply analytics, do data discovery, and visualize metrics data flowing from your cluster, you'll be better off using solutions designed specifically for such type of tasks. One popular option for log and metrics monitoring and analysis is the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) used in pair with Elastic Beats log shippers. 

In this article, we introduce you to monitoring Kubernetes with ELK and Elastic Beats. In particular, we'll show how to send Kubernetes metrics to Elasticsearch indexes using Metricbeat and access them in your Kibana dashboard for subsequent processing. Let's get started!

Qbox is fully committed to achieving compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the May 25 deadline.

Bulk indexing in Elasticsearch is an important topic to understand because you might occasionally need to write your own code to bulk index custom data. In addition, experience with bulk indexing is important when you need to understand performance issues with an Elasticsearch cluster.

In Part II of the article, we'll focus on Qbox plugins that provide various third-party integrations including SQL, Neo4j graph platform, and Couchbase Transport, and we will examine language plugins that enhance querying and analysis of the text in Korean, Chinese, Polish, Hebrew, and several other languages.

In Part I of this overview, we'll explore the Qbox plugins for morphological and phonetic analysis, tokenization and concatenation, and native scripting, among others. By the end of this review, you'll have a better understanding of what plugins you might wish to install on your Qbox-hosted cluster.

The choice between self-hosted and managed Elasticsearch may involve multiple trade-offs that are hard to recognize. In this article, we'll compare these two alternatives: Qbox-hosted and self-hosted Elasticsearch to make you aware of salient pros and cons of these two options