As more enterprises scale their infrastructure, Kubernetes has become essential for managing cloud-native applications. But while Kubernetes makes scaling easier, it also introduces new challenges, especially when it comes to balancing cost and performance.
Teams often struggle to understand where their cloud spend is going and how it impacts application health. Many end up over-provisioning resources to avoid performance issues, leading to unnecessary costs, while others under-provision and run into reliability problems. Finding the right balance/sweet spot requires real-time visibility into both performance and cost data.
With IBM Observability and IBM Kubecost now seamlessly connected, IT teams can visualize cost data alongside application performance metrics in one place, making it easier to optimize resources while maintaining reliability.
The challenge of scaling Kubernetes efficiently
Running Kubernetes at scale comes with a few common challenges:
1. IT Teams rely on multiple tools for observability, FinOps, security, and compliance—making it hard to get a clear picture of what’s happening.
2. There’s often limited automation around performance and resource optimization, leading to inefficiencies.
3. Without the right insights, teams either over-provision leading to increased costs, or under-provision causing performance issues.
Without a way to connect cost and performance data, teams are forced to make decisions based on assumptions and disconnected information rather than actual visibility of their environment. Instana integrates natively with Kubecost enabling users to achieve this visibility.
Instana and Kubecost: Better together
Visualize trends in cost with release markers
With the pre-built, out-of-the-box cost dashboard, you can track total Kubernetes cluster costs with trend visualizations to see how costs fluctuate over time and identify patterns for better forecasting and budgeting. Additionally, you can interpret cost data in tandem with release markers to correlate specific releases or deployments with spikes in cost.
Understand distribution of spend across Kubernetes resources with performance in-context
Visualize cost trends for specific namespaces with pre-built widgets. Seeing these trends allows a user to take several pre-built Instana dashboards and compare them side-by-side for a truly contextual troubleshooting and optimization experience. Additionally, this allows you to visualize how infrastructure spending impacts application performance to find the right balance between the two.
Gain granular control over the specifics
You can view cost distribution by namespace along with change percentages helping your team identify which workloads consume the most resources and which have changed the most over time. You’ll be able to break down costs across CPU, GPU, network, persistent volumes, and more. All of this is available with namespace-specific table views to keep it simple. Finally, view cost efficiency scores that will allow you to detect idle, unused, or underutilized resources, giving you a quick glance into the workload right-sizing opportunities across a specific namespace. 
Detect anomalies or spikes in cost data and act before they impact budgets
Using Instana’s smart alerts and built-in events, you can receive notifications via Slack or email on cost spikes, budget overruns, or anomalies that otherwise would’ve gone unnoticed. Additionally, you can correlate this with performance incidents to interpret if performance degradation has caused a change in spend.
Take back control of your costs
Cloud spending is expected to grow as companies continue adopting Kubernetes at scale. As a result, cost visibility is rapidly becoming a necessity. Instead of reacting to rising cloud bills after they happen, teams can take a proactive approach by adjusting resource allocations based on real-time cost and performance insights. With Instana providing core observability and cost data powered by Kubecost, you can strengthen your team’s approach around resource optimization. To learn more about the Instana-Kubecost integration, check out the documentation or sign up for a free trial here.
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