Analyzing the memory utilization of Kubernetes pods by using BMC Helix Dashboards

Scenario

Paul is a capacity planner in an IT organization. He manages and monitors all Kubernetes systems in his organization to ensure that the existing infrastructure capacity has sufficient resources to meet the current and future demands. He wants to know whether the Kubernetes pods memory is optimally and efficiently utilized. He wants to analyze the top 10 pods with high memory utilization. Using BMC Helix Dashboards, Paul can write a simple query to get the results he wants. 

User roles

The tasks in this use case involve the following user roles:

• Administrator: To configure data collection 
• Capacity planner: To analyze the Kubernetes pods

To configure data collection in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization

Alan, the administrator, completes the following prerequisite tasks:

1. Log in to BMC Helix Portal as an administrator.
2. Click the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization tile.
3. Configure the following Moviri ETL to collect data for your Kubernetes provider:
   
   • Moviri Integrator for Helix Capacity Optimization – k8s (Kubernetes) Prometheus 
4. Identify the required metrics and entities. For example, MEM_USED for Kubernetes pods.

To analyze the Kubernetes pods in BMC Helix Dashboards

Paul, the capacity planner, completes the following tasks:

1. Log in to BMC Helix Portal as a capacity planner.
   Important: Make sure that the Editor role is assigned to the capacity planner user.
2. Click the BMC Helix Dashboards tile.
3. Do one of the following:
   
   • On the Home page, click and select New Dashboard.
   • From the navigation menu, click Dashboards. Then click New > New Dashboard.
4. On the New dashboard page, click Add visualization.
5. In the Query section, select the BMC Helix data source for the query.
6. In the Query Type field, select Metric.
7. In the Source field, select Optimize.
   

8. In the Query field, add the following query:

   topk (10, MEM_USED{enttype="sys:kubernetes:pod"})
9. Enter the relevant details in other fields, such as Label, Resolution, and Format.
10. Save the query.
11. Enter a name for the dashboard, select a folder, and click Save.

Results

Paul is happy about his decision to use BMC Helix Dashboards to achieve his business goals. With BMC Helix Dashboards, Paul can now view and analyze the dashboard that includes the top 10 Kubernetes pods with high memory utilization. He has the option of using a default layout or choosing a different layout that better suits his purpose. 

He can easily share the dashboard with other stakeholders or export the dashboard to a PDF for offline analysis. For details, see Sharing and importing dashboards.