Monitor Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Add and monitor GKE clusters, standard and autopilot clusters, along with node, pod, and container details and metrics.
Before you begin
- Enable DNS access for GKE.
- Ensure that GKE monitoring is enabled for the account.
Requirements
Your account needs the following APIs, roles, and permissions:
APIs
- Kubernetes Engine API
- Cloud Asset API
- Cloud Monitoring API
Roles
- roles/container.viewer—View-only GKE cluster access
- roles/container.clusterViewer — View-only access to clusters
- roles/cloudasset.viewer
Permissions
- container.clusters.list – List all clusters in the project
- container.nodes.list – List all nodes
- container.pods.list – List all pods
License
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Requires a SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted license.
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Monitoring each cluster instance counts toward license node consumption.
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To manage or limit monitoring, you can use the Tag or Region filters.
Supported data
Standard cluster’s nodes, pods, and containers. Entities:
- GCP GKE Clusters
- GCP GKE Containers
- GCP GKE Nodes
- GCP GKE Pods
Enable DNS access for GKE
To collect detailed information about nodes, pods, and containers, enable DNS-based access to the cluster control plane must be enabled. Without enabled DNS access, only cluster information will be available.
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For details on enabling DNS during cluster creation, see Create a cluster and define control plane access in Google documentation.
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For existing clusters, modify the control plane access to enable access using DNS. See Modify the control plane access in Google documentation.
Enable GKE monitoring for your cloud account
If you configured your cloud account to monitor all supported resources or use tags to define the resources, the feature is enabled automatically. If you selected specific resources, enable the feature manually.
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In SolarWinds Platform Web Console, click Settings > Cloud Discovery. This opens the Manage Cloud Accounts page.
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Select the GKE account where you want to monitor GKE and click Edit Properties. The Edit Cloud Account wizard opens.
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Go to the Monitored resources screen, expand Compute, and ensure GKE Kubernetes is selected.
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Complete the wizard.
View GKE details
In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console menu bar, go to My Dashboards > Cloud > GCP and expand the Compute tab. Review GKE entities in available widgets.
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Click a GKE cluster, an autopilot cluster, node, container, or pod to display the entity details view.
GKE entities are available in alerts, reports, groups, and PerfStack.