Managing different clusters with lots of components like Pods, Deployments, Volumes, etc using the CLI method is very difficult. Director provides the visualization of Kubernetes, Docker and OpenEBS components with connectivity to other components which will give a good understanding of the placement of these components in the Kubernetes environment. The topology can be enhanced with the help of the scope plugin.
Mapping
It builds a logical topology of your application and infrastructure. A topology is collections of nodes and edges where nodes represent objects like processes, containers, pods, and edges represent the TCP connections and logical connections of volumes between nodes. Different node types can be filtered on and viewed and specific microservices can be drilled down on and inspected.
Views
Views can be thought of as high-level filters on your containerized microservices as they run in the cloud. They are categorized into Processes, Containers, Orchestrators, and Hosts. It displays Pods, Replica Sets, Deployments, Persistent Volumes and Services that allow you to drill down on Kubernetes clusters.
Modes
1. Graphical and Tabular Mode (Click here to see details)
The graphical mode is useful for obtaining a quick visual overview of the app, its infrastructure and connections between all the nodes.
Switching to tabular mode, nodes are represented in a list that displays the resources being consumed by processes, containers and hosts by dynamically shifting the resource-heavy nodes to the top of the table.
2. Live and Pause Mode (Click here to see details)
Topology can be monitored live, this shows the updated state of the system at every time instance.
Flexible Filtering
On top of the screen, you can see some other filtering options. Nodes can be filtered by CPU and Memory so that you can easily find containers utilizing most resources. In container view, you can filter by system, application or show all the containers and if you are running an app in Kubernetes then your app can be filtered by namespace and by container state as well(whether running, stopped, contained, uncontained).
Real-time App and Container Metrics
View contextual metrics, tags, and metadata for your containers by clicking on a node to display its details panel. Drilldown on processes inside your container to the hosts that your containers run on, arranged in expandable, sortable tables. Choose an overview of your container infrastructure, or focus on a specific microservice. Identify and correct issues to ensure the stability and performance of your containerized applications.
Powerful Search
Click on the search bar on the top which allows you to search different components of the cluster. For example: if you want to search for the dynamodb app in the topology view, then type “dynamodb” in the search bar and it will highlight the list of pods, containers, and processes where dynamodb is present both in graphical and table mode.
For queries in the topology view, you will get the highlighted results by searching using different query tags. For example: if you want to view the resources having CPU usage greater than 3%, then type “cpu>3%” in the search bar. For more information about the query tags, you visit the help section in the bottom right corner.
To know easy troubleshooting using topology click here.