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Infrastructure

Guance provides unified monitoring of all underlying computing resources that support application operations, including but not limited to:

  • Physical machines and virtual machines
  • Containers and Kubernetes clusters
  • Network devices and services
  • Various cloud services

Guance uses DataKit to collect metrics, logs, and object data from infrastructure such as hosts, containers, and cloud services, and automatically builds dynamic dependency relationships between components to form a visualized infrastructure topology. This topology clearly presents the actual running locations and association status of resources such as services, containers, and hosts, providing users with operational insights ranging from global to granular levels.

Based on a unified tagging system and flexible search capabilities, the platform allows users to quickly locate target resources and correlate data from different sources, including metrics, traces, and logs. Through smooth cross-data-type navigation and contextual linking, users can rapidly trace the root cause of issues, enabling efficient troubleshooting and performance optimization.

Features

Module Monitoring Object Core Capabilities
Host Physical machines, virtual machines, cloud servers Real-time collection of 200+ system-level metrics, covering deep performance data such as CPU steal time, memory swap activity, disk IOPS
Containers Docker, Kubernetes core resources Automatically build cluster resource topology maps, monitor Pod lifecycle status and resource quota utilization in real time
Process Running processes on hosts Deep monitoring of process-level resource consumption, establishing relationships between processes and services
Database MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc. Non-intrusive collection of database performance metrics, real-time monitoring of QPS, connections, slow queries, etc.
Network Host and container network traffic eBPF-based non-intrusive network traffic collection, monitoring TCP retransmission, connection anomalies, etc.
Resource Catalog Cloud resources, custom resources Automatic integration with cloud provider APIs, unified monitoring of managed services such as RDS, load balancers

Prerequisites

Before using Infrastructure Monitoring, ensure the following steps are completed:

  1. Sign up and log in to a Guance workspace;
  2. Install DataKit on the target host;
  3. Enable the corresponding collector based on monitoring requirements.

Core Concepts

Objects (O): Objects are entity resources in the infrastructure, such as hosts, containers, Pods, and processes. Object data includes resource attributes, status, and relationships. Through object data, you can obtain resource configuration information and running status.

For detailed explanations of metrics, tags, time series, etc., refer to Metrics.

Data Visualization

Infrastructure data is displayed through the Explorer, supporting the following analysis dimensions:

  • List view: Displays real-time object status, supports sorting, filtering, and customizing display columns
  • Hexbin map: Visualizes the dynamic topology of resource clusters, supports cross-level drill-down
  • Top List / Pie Chart / Treemap: Data distribution analysis based on grouped statistics
  • Detail page: Displays complete object attributes, metric trends, associated data, and bound views

Getting Started

Host Monitoring

Real-time collection of 200+ system-level metrics, covering deep performance data such as CPU steal time, memory swap activity, disk IOPS.

After installing DataKit, the system automatically enables a set of host-related collectors that report data to the workspace.

The default enabled collectors are:

Collector Name Description
cpu Host CPU usage
disk Disk usage
diskio Host disk I/O
mem Host memory usage
swap Swap memory usage
system Host OS load
net Host network traffic
host_process Host process list and resource usage (default collects processes that have been alive for more than 10 minutes)
hostobject Host basic information (OS, hardware, etc.)
container Host container or Kubernetes data (if the host has no containers, the collector exits automatically)

For more details, refer to DataKit Collector Usage and Host Object.

Containers and Kubernetes

Automatically build cluster resource topology maps, monitor Pod lifecycle status and resource quota utilization in real time, accurately track HPA scaling efficiency, and effectively alert on container restarts caused by insufficient resources.

Guance provides two ways to enable container data collection:

  1. Install DataKit on hosts: Enable the container collector to collect Containers and Pods data
  2. Install DataKit via DaemonSet: Collect full Kubernetes resource data (Containers, Pods, Services, Deployments, Nodes, etc.) and automatically build cluster topology

Process Monitoring

Deep monitoring of process-level resource consumption, establishing relationships between processes and services. Supports drilling down from abnormal processes to corresponding Application Performance Monitoring traces and log data.

The system enables the process collector by default, collecting process data from the last 10 minutes. To collect process metric data (CPU, memory, etc.), go to the conf.d/host folder under the DataKit installation directory, copy host_processes.conf.sample and rename it to host_processes.conf, set open_metric to true, and restart DataKit.

For more information about the collector, refer to Process.

Database Monitoring

Automatically collect performance metrics from mainstream databases through non-intrusive methods, covering MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, and other common database types. Monitor key performance data such as QPS, connections, and slow queries in real time.

Network Monitoring

eBPF-based non-intrusive network traffic collection, comprehensive monitoring of network performance indicators such as TCP retransmission and connection anomalies, and visualization of service dependencies through real-time topology.

Resource Catalog

Automatically integrate with cloud provider APIs, unify monitoring of managed services such as RDS and load balancers, and correlate cloud provider billing data to achieve dual control of cost and performance.

By creating custom resources, you can use the DataKit API and DataFlux Func to report any data to Guance, including cloud resource data from cloud providers and enterprise business data.

For specific operation steps, refer to Resource Catalog Data Reporting.

  1. Monitoring: Configure monitors such as Infrastructure Alive Detection and Threshold Detection based on infrastructure metrics.

  2. Metrics: View infrastructure measurement details, configure Generate Metrics.

  3. Logs: Correlate and analyze log data from hosts and containers.

  4. Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Drill down from infrastructure to application tracing.

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