Introducing KubeVision

Akuity was created with the mission to make engineers more productive by empowering them to get the most out of Kubernetes. To achieve this, we’ve created the Akuity Platform, the most advanced continuous deployment tool for Kubernetes. The Akuity Platform provides cloud-hosted Argo CD integrated with the next-generation continuous promotion tool, Kargo. Both are supercharged with enterprise features, production-ready, and future-proof from day one.

Today, we're happy to announce a new feature that further enhances the Akuity Platform’s ability to provide better visibility, solving various use cases for platform administrators and application developers.

Before you start reading about the KubeVision feature, make sure you secure a spot for the upcoming webinar demoing it: Enhancing Kubernetes Visibility: Introducing KubeVision.

Why KubeVision?

Investing in Kubernetes visibility and insights is not revolutionary, but rather a logical step that has been on the Akuity Platform roadmap from the very beginning. This is because Argo CD itself is a very powerful observability tool that helps developers understand the infrastructure powering their applications, drive deployments, and troubleshoot issues. The ability to show the real-time cluster state, view logs, and even provide web access to the container console makes Argo CD one of the most powerful Kubernetes dashboards in the cloud-native ecosystem. While officially a GitOps operator, Argo CD has become one of the top three most popular observability tools in the CNCF ecosystem.

So, why invest more in Kubernetes visibility? One of the principles driving Argo CD’s design is to stay laser-focused on the main use case: empowering developers to manage and troubleshoot applications deployed on Kubernetes. This means the Argo CD user interface is solely focused on visualizing the infrastructure of one application at a time, leaving little room for other use cases in areas such as security and cost analysis.

Imagine you’ve learned about a vulnerable container image and need to discover and upgrade all deployments across all your clusters. Argo CD is perfectly positioned to solve this use case. It already collects information about all workloads in the managed clusters. It has information about the images used and can even suggest if the deployment manifest is defined in a Git repository. The problem is that Argo CD’s user interface is "application management-centric", so you would need to analyze each application one by one, which is cumbersome. A vulnerable image is just one of the most obvious examples from a very long list of possible scenarios:

• Which one of my applications is the most memory/CPU hungry?
• Is there any workload with requests that are too low and might be CPU throttled?
• Are there any replicas of the same service running in one availability zone that don’t provide adequate high availability?
• Are my Kubernetes nodes optimized for packing efficiently?
• Any other question about your infrastructure, to which Argo CD most likely has the data required to answer

The problem is the lack of a tool focused on analyzing the data already collected for you by Argo CD. The Akuity Platform is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. The Akuity Platform hosts an Argo CD instance, which naturally provides access to the collected data and has the ability to extend Argo CD’s functionality beyond the narrow application management scope.

Akuity Platform KubeVision

KubeVision is a new feature of the Akuity Platform that exposes the data collected by Argo CD and provides convenient dashboards focused on various use cases listed above. The beauty of the feature is that Akuity Platform users won't need to install any additional components or even provide any configurations. The main component powering the feature is Argo CD itself. It's already monitoring all clusters and collects very important metadata that helps to make sense of the ocean of all collected data. With no additional input Akuity Platform Kubernetes insights dashboard can help you discover resources in question and link back all the way to the commit in the Git repository with the resource manifest.

Kubernetes Explorer

Building a powerful Kubernetes visibility platform is a long journey that consists of many steps. Our first step is the multi-cluster Kubernetes Explorer. This feature allows you to browse through the resources of all clusters connected to the Akuity Platform. The Kubernetes Explorer has information about the parent-child relationships between resources, enabling you to start from top-level resources such as Deployments and drill down into lower-level resources like ReplicaSets and Pods.

Similar to Argo CD, the Kubernetes visibility capabilities of the Akuity Platform provide real-time information about all resources. The advantage of the explorer is that it allows you to browse through all resources, even those not managed by Argo CD, without the restriction of viewing one application at a time.

Use Case Specific Dashboards

The Kubernetes Explorer is useful for obtaining high-level information about the cluster. For specific use cases, the Akuity Platform provides purpose-built dashboards that are much more efficient. Currently, we support Images and Containers dashboards. The Images Dashboard allows you to quickly get a list of all images used by workloads in the clusters. You can filter images by name and find workloads running those images. This dashboard is particularly useful for identifying obsolete or vulnerable images.

The Containers Dashboard allows you to discover containers running in the clusters, providing information about requested and used resources, images, and health status. This functionality enables use cases such as identifying crashing containers and discovering containers with resource requests that are too low or too high.

AI-Powered Insights

The AI Assistant feature, already available through the Argo CD extension, has received valuable feedback from its users. Building on this, the new KubeVision feature further enhances the AI Assistant’s capabilities, providing Akuity Platform users with deeper insights into all their Kubernetes resources.

Using the AI Assistant tab in KubeVision, engineers can harness the power of AI to swiftly identify the root cause of issues, receive tailored recommendations for resolution, and even obtain the code snippets needed to implement the fix.

Check out below the KubeVision intro video and register for the KubeVision webinar to learn more.

What's Coming Next?

Our team is working hard to improve the first set of dashboards, polish the user experience, add more useful information about workloads, and discover more use cases. We are collaborating closely with our early feature adopters to find more ways to present the information collected by Argo CD.

While this new improvement is already tremendously useful, we're not stopping here. Our roadmap includes several significant items to elevate the Akuity Platform’s Kubernetes visibility to the next level. We plan to enrich the dataset collected by Argo CD with additional information from third-party sources. In particular, we're working on integrating with vulnerability scanning tools to provide information about vulnerable images and workloads. This will enable use cases such as discovering and upgrading vulnerable images across all clusters.

Another useful source of information is a metrics server that provides real-time data on CPU and memory usage of workloads. Adding real-time metrics will enable use cases such as identifying memory/CPU-hungry workloads and discovering workloads with resource requests that are too low.

Last but not least, the Akuity Platform will be introducing a timeline feature that allows you to see the history of workload-related changes and correlate them with events in the cluster. The timeline feature will be invaluable for troubleshooting issues and understanding the impact of changes.

We're very excited about the possibilities and can't wait to hear your feedback. If you're interested in the feature please reach out to us!