Using Cloud Native Operations for Visibility

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Using Cloud Native Operations for Visibility

    Cloud Native Operations (CNO) for Visibility enhances IT Operations Management by detecting changes in Kubernetes clusters and updating the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with real-time data. It supports visibility across various cloud deployments, including Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS, Red Hat OpenShift, and Rancher.

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    Key Features

    • Continuous Discovery: CNO performs initial and periodic discovery to identify resources in the cluster, reporting back to your ServiceNow instance every 30 seconds.
    • Seamless Integration: The Informer pod connects to the Kubernetes API to collect events and updates, ensuring minimal disruption to the API server.
    • Automated Resource Management: Resources that are deleted are marked as Absent and removed from the CMDB after two full discovery cycles, ensuring accurate resource tracking.

    Key Outcomes

    By using CNO for Visibility, customers can expect improved visibility into their Kubernetes infrastructure, timely updates to the CMDB, and efficient resource monitoring. The Informer pod's design allows it to manage large clusters with minimal impact on performance, facilitating swift adjustments to resource changes.

    Cloud Native Operations for Visibility detects changes on resources in a Kubernetes cluster. It performs continuous discovery, reports any changes back to your instance, and updates the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with the latest data.

    CNO for Visibility enables you to gain visibility into on-premises Kubernetes clusters as well as the following Cloud deployments: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Engine (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, and Rancher.

    How it works

    When you deploy CNO for Visibility, Kubernetes creates a Deployment resource in the cluster. This resource uses a secret stored in Kubernetes to connect to your ServiceNow instance.

    The CNO Deployment resource contains a pod called Informer, which connects to the Kubernetes API server and receives events on the resources in the cluster from it. The Informer sends the collected data to the instance through the External Communication Channel (ECC) Queue table, using the ServiceNow Table API to read from and write to the queue. The Informer then updates the appropriate tables in the CMDB.

    Note:
    If the Informer is unable to report the changes, for example due to a network problem, the resources that were added to the cluster during the event are added to the CMDB after the next full discovery cycle. The resources that were removed from the cluster during the event are marked as Absent and deleted after two full discovery cycles.

    For more information about the Kubernetes resources on which the Informer collects data and the CMDB tables it populates, see Data collected by Agent Client Collector for Kubernetes – Visibility.

    Initial and periodic discovery

    In its initial discovery, the Informer finds all the resources in the Kubernetes cluster and reports them to your instance. Every 30 seconds, the Informer sends up to 1 MB of data to the instance. It typically takes up to two minutes to report data on a cluster containing 1,000 pods and another minute for every additional 1,000 pods. A single Informer pod can handle a cluster with tens of thousands of pods. If the Informer exits for any reason, Kubernetes restarts it automatically.

    After the initial discovery, the Informer continuously monitors the addition, updating, and deletion of resources in the cluster. Resources that were deleted from the cluster are marked with install_status=Absent and deleted from the CMDB within hours in a regular cleanup.

    Impact of the Informer on the Kubernetes API server

    The Informer has minimal impact on the Kubernetes API server. It fetches the complete list of relevant resources only once and saves it to memory. From then on, it synchronizes with the Kubernetes API server and never pulls the complete list again. During the periodic and on-demand full discovery cycles, the Informer resends the saved list of resources to the instance.

    CNO for Visibility performance and scalability benchmark

    For CNO for Visibility benchmarks, see the Performance results for CNO for Visibility [KB1555851] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.