Understanding Kubernetes can be hard. Not only in the initial learning and understanding of the concepts, but also the aspect of keeping an overview of what is happening inside at the workloads of the cluster can be challenging. How can you quickly and easily tell if your apps are healthy, well utilised and running fine?
This talk intends to look at the various aspects of Kubernetes observability and to introduce and compares multiple Open Source tools to achieve that. The range of tools covers different observability levels and requirements of different user groups.
It starts with tools simply querying the Kubernetes API and delivering the outputs in an easy-to-understand UI, goes over the possibilities of services meshes and ends with application-side logging and monitoring. For each level of observability the user has to pay a certain price in terms of configuration and runtime overhead. In turn the quality and depth of the information is different.
The intended take-away is to get a feeling which type of tooling is the right one for a given purpose. Most options will be shown in a live demonstration. Some of the technologies have a polyglot aspect and can be applied independent of the framework. This talk has a dominant focus on JVM-based applications.

Do you know how to…
…wait for a Pod to be Running, or for a Deployment to be Available?
…"turn off and on again" a Deployment?  
…connect to a Service in a different Namespace when the client is hardcoded to connect to "db"?
… generate a YAML manifest without copy-pasting it from the docs or ChatGPT?
… switch between namespaces (or even clusters!) super quickly?
… get an image with (almost) any tool you need without having to write and build a Dockerfile?
If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then this talk is for you, since you'll see how to do all these things (and a few more). You're invited to a parade of tips, tricks, and techniques, to improve your productivity and reduce your frustration with Kubernetes!