Argo CD is more powerful and versatile than ever with Akuity. The Akuity Platform allows users to provision Argo CD instances in seconds, ready for large-scale use from day one with flexibility and security. Kubevision– part of the Akuity Platform–expands observability, broadening Argo CD’s functionality and enabling valuable use cases for platform administrators. Kubevision employs an innovative AI Assistant, making Argo CD the leading visibility tool for Kubernetes.

Since launching Kubevision just two months ago, we’ve received incredible feedback from early adopters, inspiring new features for the tool. We introduced Infrastructure View, which maps hosts and pods across all Kubernetes clusters, and dashboards that highlight deprecated Kubernetes APIs and resources stuck in a deleting state.

Today, we’re excited to introduce a major enhancement to Kubevision: the Timeline View feature.

Timeline View

The Timeline View feature unveils a new layer of visibility into Kubernetes clusters: the dimension of time. The ability to view historical events is valuable for multiple use cases, and in this release, Akuity is focused specifically on outage troubleshooting and reducing recovery times.

The Akuity Platform stores critical workload-related events and uses this data to provide an exceptionally powerful incident debugging tool. The Timeline View dashboard is available in both the Akuity Platform and the Argo CD user interface, offering valuable insights for both application developers and platform administrators. 

Correlation Between Events

Argo CD already gathers extensive information on managed workloads, sufficient to diagnose the root cause of most outages. It tracks Kubernetes configuration changes, container restarts, and readiness and liveness probe failures. When an incident occurs, the Application Details page is typically the first tool engineers use, as it provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current Kubernetes state. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer the next logical question: “What has changed?” This is precisely what the Timeline view feature addresses.

The Akuity Platform offers an Argo CD UI extension that introduces a new Timeline View panel. The extension visualizes health state changes in application workloads and various related events. 

This functionality immediately answers a variety of questions crucially important during outage troubleshooting: 

• How long has the workload been degraded?

• Is the issue transient or ongoing?

• Is it improving or worsening?

• When did the change occur?

• What exactly has changed?

Event Details

Once the engineer identifies the change that likely caused the outage, the next step is to determine what was modified and revert the configuration to the most recent healthy state. The Timeline View provides this information with just one click, saving the engineer from switching between various third-party tools and reducing investigation time at the most critical moment. For example, in an incident caused by a change in the Deployment spec, the Timeline View provides a diff visualization of the Deployment spec changes.

Non Workload Related Events

After identifying the root cause and resolving the incident, the next step is to determine why the issue occurred and what actions are needed to prevent it from happening again. The Timeline View supports this process by providing information on various events not directly related to the workload itself. The list of events include:

• Kubernetes Node events that happened to host one of the affected workload pods:

• Argo CD Application events that manages the affected workload:

• Finally, Audit Log events related to the workload:

Timeline View For Cluster Addons

All these features are extremely helpful to application developers, enabling them to troubleshoot workloads managed by Argo CD. However, even if a workload is not explicitly managed by Argo CD, it is still monitored by Akuity and covered by Kubevision features. Platform administrators can view workload-related events for any cluster namespace through the Akuity Portal user interface.

What Is Coming Next?

The Timeline View is already available to Akuity customers, and we are actively working on incorporating initial feedback. The team is dedicated to refining the experience, and our roadmap remains full of new ideas. Having historical data opens the door for very powerful AI based integrations. Today, the Akuity AI Assistant enables software developers to analyze the state of Kubernetes-managed infrastructure and to quickly resolve incidents. The power of having an engine that continuously collects the most important workload events–combined with the data gathered by Argo CD–is clear. Imagine an experienced AI powered DevOps engineer that keeps an eye on your infrastructure 27 x 7. 

We are excited to make this dream a reality and cannot wait to try the first version ourselves. Are you interested as well? Let us know and we will be happy to add you as an early adopter!