Introducing our add-on for Amazon EKS Blueprints

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) helps you manage, scale, and deploy your Kubernetes clusters, but you still need to monitor your clusters and applications to mitigate problems and optimize performance. Container-based environments are uniquely challenging to monitor, in part because containers are constantly being added and removed. With our new add-on for the Amazon EKS Blueprints framework, built on the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), you can now deploy New Relic’s observability components with code instead of manually instrumenting, making it simpler to monitor your EKS clusters.

Our add-on makes it easier to deploy Kubernetes observability components from New Relic to your EKS clusters, using programming concepts you’re already familiar with. Pixie is built in as an optional component, with no additional setup for eBPF-based observability. Adding New Relic into your EKS environment means you can correlate your services’ golden signals with Kubernetes infrastructure and access your container logs in one click, minimizing the time it takes to detect and diagnose issues.

See the AWS Partner Network blog to learn how to install the AWS Cloud Development Kit, initialize a new project, and build an EKS cluster containing the New Relic EKS Blueprints Add-on.

Whether you're just getting started with EKS Blueprints and the AWS Cloud Development Kit, or you're a mature DevOps shop looking to manage, secure, and automate your development platforms, the New Relic add-on for EKS Blueprints gives you deep visibility into the performance of your cluster.

EKS monitoring best practices

EKS Blueprints is a feature of AWS that allows users to easily create and manage clusters of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using pre-defined templates called blueprints. These blueprints include best practices for security and scalability and can be customized to fit the specific needs of the user. EKS Blueprints can help reduce the time and effort required to set up and manage an EKS cluster, making it easier for you to run your applications on Kubernetes.

Monitoring an EKS blueprint is important because it allows you to ensure that your Kubernetes cluster is running smoothly and that all of the resources it is using are functioning as expected. This can help you identify and troubleshoot any issues that may arise, such as resource contention or network connectivity problems.

Additionally, monitoring can provide you with important performance metrics, such as CPU and memory usage, which can help you optimize the performance of your applications running on the cluster.

Best practices for monitoring EKS Blueprints

Overall, monitoring an EKS blueprint is essential for ensuring the availability, reliability, and performance of your Kubernetes cluster and the applications running on it. Here are some best practices for monitoring EKS Blueprints:

• Regularly check the health of the nodes in your cluster. This includes monitoring the status of each node, as well as the resources that are available to them (such as CPU and memory usage).
• Use CloudWatch to monitor the performance of your applications. This includes tracking metrics such as request latency, error rates, and throughput.
• Use a log management tool, such as CloudWatch Logs or New Relic, to aggregate and analyze logs from your applications and cluster.
• Use a monitoring tool, such as Prometheus or New Relic, to collect and visualize metrics from your applications and the Kubernetes cluster itself.
• Set up alerts for critical issues, such as a node going down or a pod in a critical state.
• Use dashboards, such as the Kubernetes Dashboard or Grafana, to monitor and troubleshoot your cluster.
• Create custom metrics for your applications, and monitor them using a tool such as Prometheus or New Relic.
• Monitor network traffic and security events to detect and respond to potential threats.
• Regularly review and update your monitoring and alerting configurations to ensure they are configured correctly and are still relevant to your current environment.
• Have an incident response plan in place and test it regularly.

Get started with our add-on for EKS Blueprints

Watch this video to learn how to deploy the add-on for EKS Blueprints in your cluster.