OpenShift Series: Centralized monitoring for your OpenShift clusters

Updated 14-Jan-2025 for OpenShift 4.15

Introduction

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation.

In this article we will look at OpenShift monitoring capabilities and out of the box support to integrate with external monitoring systems. We will also look at various enterprise monitoring systems that you can use to monitor and collect metrics from OpenShift.

If you are interested to know more about centralized logging for your OpenShift clusters, take a look at Aggregate OpenShift logs into enterprise logging system | by Jaydeep Ayachit | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Red Hat OpenShift Monitoring

OpenShift Container Platform includes a pre-configured, pre-installed, and self-updating monitoring stack that provides monitoring for core platform components. A set of alerts are included by default that immediately notify cluster administrators about issues with a cluster. Default dashboards in the OpenShift Container Platform web console include visual representations of cluster metrics to help you to quickly understand the state of your cluster.

The OpenShift Container Platform monitoring stack is based on the Prometheus open source project and its wider ecosystem. The monitoring stack includes the following:

• Default platform monitoring components: A set of platform monitoring components are installed in the openshift-monitoring project by default during an OpenShift Container Platform installation. This provides monitoring for core OpenShift Container Platform components including Kubernetes services. The default monitoring stack also enables remote health monitoring for clusters.
• Components for monitoring user-defined projects: After optionally enabling monitoring for user-defined projects, additional monitoring components are installed in the openshift-user-workload-monitoring project. This provides monitoring for user-defined projects.

Using monitoring for user-defined projects, you can query metrics, review dashboards, and manage alerting rules and silences for your own projects in the OpenShift Container Platform web…