Introducing the SKE Headlamp Plugin
Navigating Kubernetes resources can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack, especially when trying to gain a comprehensive overview of everything deployed within your cluster. While kubectl is a familiar tool, we've heard that it can be complicated to visualise the entire landscape of Kratix Promises and Resources.
To address this, we've been developing a powerful new solution: a SKE plugin for Headlamp, designed to provide unparalleled observability for your Kubernetes environments.
Why Headlamp?
Headlamp is a user-friendly Kubernetes UI focused on extensibility and its core purpose is to offer robust observability on top of Kubernetes. It provides adaptable UI & branding to create custom experiences with minimal effort and features RBAC-based controls, adapting to a user's cluster permissions. It can be run as a web app, desktop app, or in-cluster. Headlamp is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, part of the Kubernetes SIG UI.
While the SKE Backstage integration provides a layer of observability, it is much more aimed at the Platform users, not as much to the Platform teams building the Promises powering the Platform. Headlamp, on the other hand, offers a similar experience to Backstage, but much more relevant to the Platform teams.
Crucially, Headlamp supports the development of custom plugins, and that's precisely what we've leveraged to create our Kratix plugin.
Enhanced Visibility with the Kratix Headlamp Plugin
Our new plugin integrates seamlessly with your Headlamp installation, offering a user-friendly interface to manage and monitor your Kratix resources. Watch the demo below or keep on reading for a closer look at its key features.
The Promise Views
This dedicated tab provides a quick overview of all your Kratix Promises. From here, you can easily jump into the details of any specific Promise, such as a Redis Promise, and view further information. Within the Promise details, you can access crucial information, including:
- The conditions of the Promise.
- The last time the associated pipeline ran.
- The ability to jump directly into the pipeline run itself.
- Visibility into the pods that were executed as part of that pipeline.
- Access to logs for detailed troubleshooting.
The Resource Views
Complementing the Promises view, the Resources tab allows you to see all the Kratix resources deployed across your cluster. The plugin offers powerful filtering capabilities, enabling you to narrow down your view by, for example, Promise or Namespace
Just like with Promises, you can click on any resource (e.g., an 'app cache' in the mobile namespace) to view its details. This includes seeing when its pipeline last ran, jumping into the pipeline, inspecting executed pods, and investigating logs for all containers involved in the execution.
The Map View: A Visual Overview
Headlamp includes a very useful built-in visualisation where you can see all resources deployed across your cluster. We've extended this capability to provide a similar map view specifically for your Kratix Promises. By filtering for Kratix resources, you can visually explore your deployed Promises and understand their relationships.
For instance, you can click on a Promise to see the resources it owns, like its Resource Requests. Furthermore, the map view highlights associated jobs, such as the pipeline jobs that executed the Promise. You can also see the Promise's configure pipeline directly in this tree-like, map-based view, allowing for easy navigation and understanding of your platform's entire resource topology.
Try it out!
The Kratix Headlamp plugin is currently available for Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) users.
We're excited about the potential of this new plugin to dramatically simplify Kubernetes observability for Kratix users.
Looking ahead, our next major focus is to introduce comprehensive visibility into compound promises, allowing you to easily see their sub-promises and associated resources. This will provide an even deeper understanding of your Platform.
Also, we are keen to get your feedback! What information would you like us to expose next? What's missing? What are some features you'd like to see? Send the requests our way!
If you're interested in trying out a version of Headlamp with our plugin, please let us know! We can package it up and send it your way.
