This week, Replicated’s Vendor Experience team shipped a complete rebuild of our telemetry and reporting pages for the health and status of vendors’ end-customer instances running in the field. This is the first feature in our improved Instance Insights capabilities theme making it easy for Vendor Support Engineers and other customer-facing staff to understand the health and performance of a customer instance in one place. Now, your team can quickly and easily get answers to “what has been happening recently with this instance”, including but not limited to:
- Has the application experienced any downtime recently? How long has it been down?
- Have any cluster or infrastructure changes occurred recently? Have nodes been lost or added? Has the underlying Kubernetes version changed?
- Were any upgrades attempted recently? Which of them succeeded? Which version is the app currently running?
This gives deep context and saves valuable time for vendor team members who are about to jump into a debugging session with an end customer. If used well, it will speed time to recovery for customer issues and should even allow vendor teams to solve many problems asynchronously.
Instance Details
The Instance Detail page replaces the previous version and is available by navigating to Customers > Customer > Reporting > Instance. The data provided here is described briefly below, as well as in the Instance Insights documentation. Below is a short demo video:
App Information
The currently deployed version, age, and last check-in, plus the current health of the application. Application health is defined by Vendor-defined Status Informers.
Cluster Details
Low-level installation details like Kubernetes and KOTS versions, cluster node statuses, and datacenter/cloud flavors.
Uptime Data
A time series representation of recent instance states, including Ready, Degraded, Missing/Unavailable, and Inactive.
Event History
An ordered, filterable history of instance events including changes to the cluster, application, and underlying infrastructure. App status and health can be defined with Status Informers.
Insights (Beta)
Beyond basic operational and application details, a granular, event-based data architecture allows Replicated to surface key metrics for software distribution like time to install, instance uptime, and upgrade success rate. These insights will not only help vendor support engineers and other customer-facing staff improve time to recover and time to value, but will also open the door to more strategic conversations about bottlenecks and friction points in the distribution process. Further, these key metrics will help vendors better communicate challenges and successes with Replicated’s platform, both internally and when collaborating with the Replicated team.
Getting Started
You can start using this page today by navigating to Customers > Customer > Reporting > Instance. These new capabilities are available for all non-air gap instances. Full documentation on this new feature is available at Instance Insights.
What’s Next
While we’ve launched the first iteration of instance reporting, we’ll continue to polish this feature with improved user experience, information on kURL Node Operating systems, and visibility into the pass/warn/fail/skip status of instance Preflight Checks. You will also see references to this page start to be embedded in support tickets, customer reporting, and other parts of the product.
Follow the Instance Insights Label on the public Replicated Product Roadmap for more updates around upcoming features like Improved Customer Reporting, Rolling Up Insight Data Across All Customers, and Air gap Support for Instance Insights
Have Feedback? Found an Issue?
We’ve come a long way since the initial launch of instance reporting in 2015, and like any product team, we rely heavily on our customers’ collaboration and feedback to help us grow and evolve our offering. Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at https://vendor.replicated.com/support -- we’d love to hear from you!