Case Study: Nutanix unifies VM and microservice monitoring with Grafana

How the company's service architecture has changed with the adoption of containers

Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software, faced challenges monitoring its new containerized microservices architecture due to the ephemeral nature of containers, shared resources, and insufficient tooling. This created a need for a new observability approach that could work alongside its legacy VM monitoring system. To address this, they turned to Grafana for their observability needs.

The solution involved integrating the open source Prometheus with Nutanix's in-house Prism Alerts system using a custom "alerts-broker." This provided a unified monitoring experience that combined the best features of both platforms. Nutanix heavily depends on Grafana dashboards, particularly a pod resource dashboard, to optimize CPU and memory consumption and ensure their services perform correctly. Grafana provided the essential observability tooling needed for their Kubernetes environment.

Nutanix

Rohith Subramanyam

Software Engineer