Blog: Spotlight on SIG Instrumentation

Observability requires the right data at the right time for the right consumer (human or piece of software) to make the right decision. In the context of Kubernetes, having best practices for cluster observability across all Kubernetes components is crucial. SIG Instrumentation helps to address this issue by providing best practices and tools that all other SIGs use to instrument Kubernetes components-like the API server , scheduler , kubelet and kube-controller-manager. In this SIG Instrumentation spotlight, Imran Noor Mohamed , SIG ContribEx-Comms tech lead talked with Elana Hashman , and Han Kang , chairs of SIG Instrumentation, on how the SIG is organized, what are the current challenges and how anyone can get involved and contribute. Imran (INM) : Hello, thank you for the opportunity of learning more about SIG Instrumentation. Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your role, and how you got involved in SIG Instrumentation? Han (HK) : I started in SIG Instrumentation in 2018, and became a chair in 2020. I primarily got involved with SIG instrumentation due to a number of upstream issues with metrics which ended up affecting GKE in bad ways. As a result, we ended up launching an initiative to stabilize our metrics and make metrics a proper API. Elana (EH) : I also joined SIG Instrumentation in 2018 and became a chair at the same time as Han. I was working as a site reliability engineer (SRE) on bare metal Kubernetes clusters and was working to build out our observability stack. I encountered some issues with label joins where Kubernetes metrics didn’t match kube-state-metrics ( KSM ) and started participating in SIG meetings to improve things. I helped test performance improvements to kube-state-metrics and ultimately coauthored a KEP for overhauling metrics in the 1.