Monitor VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Clusters with New Relic

Enterprises are moving Kubernetes into the same private cloud where their virtual machines run. VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), a component of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), not only makes that simple and easy, but also does so in an integrated platform trusted by enterprise customers across the world. It gives platform teams Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) conformant Kubernetes built into VCF, managed with the same platform and tools that their IT teams know and trust. As VKS is a component of VCF, many enterprise organizations are already equipped to seamlessly run their container-based workloads next to their existing virtual machines.

New Relic has validated its Kubernetes monitoring on VKS 3.6. Mutual customers running VKS can now monitor their Kubernetes infrastructure alongside the applications that run on it.

New Relic on VKS

Kubernetes gives teams control over where workloads run, but it also adds a layer to watch. Pods are rescheduled constantly, services span many containers, and a problem can start anywhere between the application code and the node underneath it. When those signals live in separate tools, troubleshooting turns into a search. Once those clusters carry production traffic, the issues get more sensitive. A checkout service slows down and the on-call engineer must work out whether the cause is a struggling pod, a node under memory pressure, or a change in the application code. According to New Relic’s 2026 Observability Forecast, high-impact outages cost organizations a mean of $1.85 million per hour.

With New Relic on VKS, platform engineers, SREs, and developers work from the same data.

• Kubernetes and applications side by side: Cluster, node, pod, and container health sit next to application performance, logs, and traces. Teams can follow a slow transaction back to the workload and node behind it without switching tools. 
• Tested path to production: New Relic has been validated on VKS 3.6 and supports VKS 3.x. VCF teams can monitor their VKS clusters in New Relic with confidence.
• Faster answers when something breaks: Alerts, dashboards, and New Relic AI work on VKS data the same way they do across the rest of the stack a team monitors in New Relic. 

For teams that also want visibility into the infrastructure under their clusters, New Relic collects certain observability data from vCenter on hosts, virtual machines, datastores, and clusters.

Validated configurations

New Relic validated the integration on VKS 3.6 in a sandbox environment set up with the VMware team. Supported versions are below.

Full details are in the New Relic Kubernetes integration compatibility and requirements documentation. 

Get started

1. Sign up for a free New Relic account, which includes 100GB of data ingest per month, or log into an existing one
2. Check that your environment meets the compatibility and requirements for VKS
3. Install the New Relic Kubernetes integration and open your cluster in New Relic to see its nodes, pods, and workloads