Two Comcast open source projects, Kuberhealthy and Trickster, joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox today. 

Trickster is an open source monitoring tool designed to make Prometheus dashboards run smoother and faster. It uses a reverse proxy cache for the Prometheus API that accelerates dashboard rendering times for any series queried from Prometheus. This displays a visual rendering of cached data via a single dashboard and accelerates chart load times, the vendor said. 

Kuberhealthy is also an open source monitoring tool. It was initially developed to help Comcast engineering teams better monitor and understand the full picture of their Kubernetes clusters. It runs Daemonset deployment and termination, component health, excessive pod restarts and pod status all as defaults. 

Shilla Saebi, open source program office at Comcast and a CNCF ambassador, explained that it mimics real workloads in clusters, while integrating easily with existing monitoring pipelines like Prometheus. “This combination of tests gives us the most definitive answer to our original question: ‘Is this cluster healthy.’” 

Both Trickster and Kuberhealthy were developed by Comcast engineers. 

“For our developers and technologists, it’s tremendous recognition of the years of work they’ve done with open source software, from using it, to contributing code, to developing and open sourcing our own projects,” Saebi said. “It also signals to all the talented open source developers out there that Comcast is a great place to work on these sorts of projects at scale.  For the projects themselves, it means that they benefit from CNCF’s incredible global community, and will get the opportunity to thrive even more with expanded marketing and support.”

Container monitoring is becoming more important as an increasing number of organizations are using containers to maximize their cloud investments. However, being able to monitor what is happening across thousands of often short-lived applications can be challenging.

In addition to Prometheus, other container monitoring platforms include Datadog, ELK, and Sysdig.