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Ajay Kumar
Ajay Kumar

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Why K8S internal "svc" uptime is also important !

If you're running microservices in Kubernetes, you've probably faced this problem: your external monitoring says everything is fine, but users are experiencing issues because one of your internal services is down.

Traditional uptime monitors like UptimeRobot or Pingdom are great for monitoring public endpoints, but they can't see inside your cluster. That's where PandaWatch comes in - it's a simple uptime monitoring tool specifically designed for internal Kubernetes services.

The Gap in Kubernetes Monitoring

Most uptime tools monitor from the outside:

  • ✅ Good for: Public websites and APIs (https://mysite.com)
  • ❌ Can't monitor: Internal services (payment-service.default.svc.cluster.local)
  • ❌ Miss: Service-to-service failures inside your cluster

A Common Scenario

Your public API at https://api.myapp.com/health returns 200 OK, but your payment service inside the cluster is failing. External monitors won't catch this until customers report failed transactions.

Simple Internal Service Monitoring

PandaWatch runs a lightweight agent in your cluster that monitors internal Kubernetes services:

# Configure which services to monitor
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: payment-service
  annotations:
    pandawatch.io/monitor: "true"
spec:
  selector:
    app: payment-service
  ports:
  - port: 8080
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What It Does:

  1. HTTP Health Checks: Pings your internal services (like payment-service:8080/health)
  2. Basic Uptime Tracking: Records when services are up/down
  3. Simple Alerts: Email/Slack notifications when services fail
  4. Status Pages: Shows which internal services are operational
  5. Dashboard: Web UI to see service uptime stats

What Makes It Different

1. Kubernetes-Native

Simple deployment with kubectl:

kubectl apply -f https://install.pandawatch.io/agent.yaml
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The agent runs in your cluster and monitors services from the inside.

2. Just Uptime Monitoring

No complex metrics, dashboards, or overwhelming features. Just answers the question: "Is my service up or down?"

3. Easy Setup

Add one annotation to your service and you're monitoring:

annotations:
  pandawatch.io/monitor: "true"
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4. Affordable

  • Free: 5 services
  • Pro ($15/mo): 50 services, custom status page domains
  • No per-host pricing like other monitoring tools

Quick Setup

Step 1: Sign up at dashboard.pandawatch.io

Step 2: Deploy the agent

Step 3: Add monitoring to your services 

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-api
  annotations:
    pandawatch.io/monitor: "true"
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Step 4: Get alerts when services go down

That's it! Simple uptime monitoring for your internal Kubernetes services.

Why We Built This

Existing monitoring solutions either:

  • Can't monitor internal Kubernetes services (UptimeRobot, Pingdom)
  • Are too complex and expensive (Datadog, New Relic)
  • Require extensive setup (Prometheus stack)

We wanted something simple: just uptime monitoring for internal K8s services.

Comparison

Tool External Sites K8s Services Price Setup
PandaWatch ✅ ✅ $15/mo 5 min
UptimeRobot ✅ ❌ $7/mo 2 min
Pingdom ✅ ❌ $10/mo 5 min
Datadog ✅ ✅ $15/host/mo 30+ min

Try It Free

🚀 Start monitoring - 5 services free

What's your experience with monitoring internal Kubernetes services? Drop a comment below - I'd love to hear how you're solving this problem today.

PandaWatch is a product of PandaStack - simple tools for cloud-native teams

Tags

kubernetes #monitoring #devops #uptime #microservices #pandastack

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