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When organizations deploy containerized applications using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), having a clear view of their distributed microservices and dependencies is crucial for maintaining reliable application performance. Instana Observability provides an Amazon EKS Add-on that facilitates the deployment of Instana agents within Amazon EKS clusters. This add-on enables users to collect and analyze real-time performance data, offering insights into their containerized applications.

In this blog post, you’ll discover how to install the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on by subscribing to the Instana Observability Operator directly from the Amazon EKS Console. Additionally, you’ll learn about the architecture and implementation steps necessary to set up monitoring for your Amazon EKS clusters and workloads.

Enhancing Visibility in Amazon EKS Environments

Amazon EKS allows for the execution of Kubernetes container workloads that can dynamically scale across nodes based on demand. Implementing effective observability practices significantly improves application availability and the stability of your environment. With Instana monitoring, you can:

• Monitor communications between services to identify optimization opportunities and ensure consistent performance.
• Access correlated logs, metrics, and traces to better understand system behavior and resolve issues effectively.
• Maintain visibility as your Kubernetes clusters evolve, regardless of how your workloads grow or change.

Instana Amazon EKS Add-on

The Instana Amazon EKS add-on enhances visibility across your Kubernetes environments. Upon deployment, the Instana agent automatically identifies components within your Amazon EKS clusters, such as nodes, namespaces, deployments, services, and pods. The agent gathers performance metrics at 1-second intervals and implements automated code instrumentation for programming languages like Java, Node.js, and .NET, without needing manual configuration.

Instana constructs dependency maps that illustrate relationships between applications, containers, and infrastructure components while tracing end-to-end requests across services. The aggregated data is presented in a unified monitoring dashboard, displaying health metrics for your Kubernetes orchestration layer alongside application performance data. This methodology allows for correlating configuration changes with performance impacts.

Reference Architecture

The diagram below illustrates how the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on is deployed within an Amazon EKS cluster:

Figure 1. Reference architecture of the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on.

The architecture comprises four primary components:

1. Instana Operator: Installed as an Amazon EKS add-on, this component manages the deployment and lifecycle of Instana custom resources, such as Agent DaemonSets, ConfigMaps, and Secrets, ensuring they remain in the desired state within your Amazon EKS cluster.
2. Instana Agent: Deployed as a DaemonSet, the Instana Agent automatically discovers and instruments hosts, containers, and Kubernetes entities to collect metrics, traces, and logs from every node in your Amazon EKS cluster.
3. Data Collection: The Instana Agent includes collectors that gather metrics, traces, logs, and events from your Amazon EKS environment. Data optimization occurs on the Instana Backend through aggregation, compression, and batching to enhance resource efficiency. The processed data supports the analytics and visualizations available in the Instana UI. Furthermore, Instana persists data in stateful storage and ensures encryption at rest.
4. Instana Backend: This serves as the central storage and analytics system for your observability data. Users can opt for a fully managed SaaS on AWS or self-hosted deployment in their AWS account. In this case, we utilize the fully managed SaaS backend. The backend processes collected data and makes it accessible through the Instana UI via HTTPS and TLS encryption.

Key Capabilities

The Instana Amazon EKS Add-on includes several noteworthy capabilities:

• AWS-native deployment: Install the add-on using the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI, seamlessly integrating with your existing AWS workflows and simplifying configuration.
• High-resolution monitoring: Collect metrics at 1-second intervals and capture distributed traces for every request, providing in-depth visibility into your services and infrastructure.
• Dynamic service mapping: Automatically discover resources and visualize dependencies between services throughout your Amazon EKS environment.
• Pattern detection: Utilize algorithms to identify anomalies and potential issues before they impact your applications.
• Operational scalability: Ensure monitoring effectiveness remains intact across clusters of various sizes as your workloads evolve.

Prerequisites

Before installing the Instana Amazon EKS add-on, you should have:

• Familiarity with AWS, particularly Amazon EKS, and Instana.
• Access to an AWS account with permissions to create the necessary resources described in the implementation steps.
• An active Amazon EKS cluster. For guidelines on creating one, refer to the instructions on creating an Amazon EKS cluster.
• A workstation equipped with AWS CLI, eksctl, and kubectl, all properly configured.
• An active subscription to Instana. You can initiate a free trial via AWS Marketplace.
• An Instana license key, which can be generated after logging into the Instana platform, to be used in step 15 of the Implementation Steps section.

Costs

Implementing this solution will incur costs for AWS services, including but not limited to Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, and data transfer. For current pricing details, check Amazon EKS Pricing, Amazon EC2 Pricing, and Amazon VPC Pricing. Additionally, after the free trial period, costs for the Instana subscription will apply according to the chosen plan on AWS Marketplace. To estimate your monthly expenses, you can utilize the AWS Pricing Calculator. Make sure to delete resources when they are no longer needed, as noted in the cleanup section, to prevent unnecessary charges.

Implementation Steps

To install the Instana add-on:

1. Navigate to the Amazon EKS Console.
2. In the left navigation pane, select Clusters.
3. Choose the name of the cluster where you want to install the Instana EKS Add-on.
4. Click on the Add-ons tab under the Cluster info.
5. Select Get more add-ons.
6. On the Select add-ons page, scroll down to the AWS Marketplace add-ons section and enter Instana in the search field.
7. Select the IBM Instana Observability Operator add-on and click Next.
8. On the Configure selected add-ons settings page, choose View subscription options to access the Subscription options.
9. Review the Pricing details and Legal sections, then click the Subscribe button to continue.
10. Choose the latest available version from the Version dropdown list and click Next.
11. On the Review and add page, select Create.
12. After the installation of the Instana add-on is complete, a message will appear in the cluster overview dashboard indicating that the add-on was successfully added to the cluster.

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