I'm building a Kubernetes app and need to watch containers, logs, and traces, where do I start?

A good place to start is to think in terms of three layers of observability:

1. Containers / workload health
2. Logs
3. Traces

For a Kubernetes app, the usual first step is to set up metrics + logs, then add tracing once your services are instrumented.

1) Start with container and cluster visibility

You want to know:

• Is the pod running?
• Is it restarting / OOM-killing?
• What’s CPU/memory usage?
• Are readiness/liveness probes failing?
• Are nodes healthy?

Typical tools:

• Prometheus for metrics
• Grafana for dashboards
• kube-state-metrics for Kubernetes object state
• node-exporter for node metrics

If you’re using Helm, the common quick start is:

• kube-prometheus-stack

2) Add logs

For logs, the most common pattern in Kubernetes is:

• Write logs to stdout/stderr
• Use a log collector/agent to ship them

Common options:

• Fluent Bit
• Vector
• Promtail + Loki
• Elastic Agent / Filebeat

A very practical stack:

• Loki for log storage
• Grafana to query and view logs

Important log tips:

• Use structured JSON logs
• Include fields like trace_id, span_id, service, pod, namespace
• Make logs correlation-friendly so you can jump from a trace to related logs

3) Add tracing

Distributed tracing helps you follow a request across services.

Use:

• OpenTelemetry for instrumentation
• Export traces to:
  • Jaeger
  • Grafana Tempo
  • Honeycomb
  • Datadog
  • etc.

Recommended approach:

• Instrument your app with OpenTelemetry SDK
• Deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector in the cluster
• Send traces to your backend of choice

4) Connect logs, metrics, and traces

The best debugging experience comes when you can correlate them:

• Metrics show “something is wrong”
• Traces show “where the latency/error is”
• Logs show “why it happened”

To make that work well:

• Propagate trace context between services
• Add trace_id to logs
• Tag metrics with stable labels carefully

5) A simple starter stack

If you want a straightforward, widely used setup:

• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics
• Loki + Fluent Bit for logs
• OpenTelemetry Collector + Tempo or Jaeger for traces

This gives you:

• Container health and resource usage
• Searchable logs
• End-to-end request tracing

6) A practical order to implement

1. Get pod and node metrics working
2. Set up log collection from stdout/stderr
3. Add basic dashboards and alerts
4. Instrument your app with OpenTelemetry
5. Add trace/log correlation

7) If you want the fastest path

If you’re just getting started, I’d suggest:

• Install kube-prometheus-stack
• Install Grafana Loki
• Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector
• Instrument one service first with OpenTelemetry
• Expand from there

If you want, I can give you either:

• a minimal Helm-based setup, or
• a production-ready observability architecture for Kubernetes.