Introduction to Sarkan Management Pack

The Sarkan Addon provides unified observability for Sarkan, the distributed, fault-tolerant, and highly available Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platform for Kubernetes. Built on the robust SaunaFS filesystem, Sarkan delivers scalable and resilient storage for cloud-native workloads. This addon integrates Sarkan's powerful capabilities directly into VMware Aria Operations, giving you a single pane of glass to monitor the health, performance, and topology of your entire storage infrastructure.

How does it Work?

The addon connects to the Sarkan environment through the Sarkan Adapter instance. The adapter automatically queries the Kubernetes API to discover all components - from Sarkan's Custom Resources (CRDs) like SaunaFS Clusters and Hostdisks, to standard objects like Pods and Persistent Volumes. The collected data and its interconnecting relationships are then mapped into a unified model within VMware Aria Operations, creating a dynamic and complete topology of your storage environment.

Features

Unified Discovery: Automatically discovers all Sarkan and Kubernetes components, from the Hostdisk CSI on nodes to the SaunaFS Operator and SaunaFS CSI driver.
Automated Topology Mapping: Instantly visualizes the complete dependency chain, providing an intuitive map of how applications, volumes, and physical storage are connected.
Comprehensive Health Monitoring: Tracks the operational status of critical Sarkan components, ensuring the fault-tolerance and high-availability of your storage clusters.
Performance Analytics: Gathers real-time and historical metrics on volume capacity, IOPS, and latency to guarantee performance for demanding stateful applications.
Seamless Integration: Natively integrates with VMware Aria Operations for creating custom dashboards, alerts, and reports tailored to your operational needs.

Benefits

Full-Stack Observability Gain a complete, top-to-bottom view of your entire storage stack. The pack allows you to trace the full dependency path—from a Virtual Machine hosting a Kubernetes Node, to the physical Hostdisk, the Persistent Volume it provides, and finally to the SaunaFS Cluster and the Pod consuming the storage.
Ensure High Availability for Stateful Applications Sarkan is engineered for resilience. This management pack gives you the tools to monitor the health of every component in the chain, ensuring the high availability that your business-critical, stateful applications demand on Kubernetes.
Optimize Storage Performance By correlating metrics from the application layer down to the physical disk, you can quickly identify performance bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation for your most demanding workloads.
Simplify Troubleshooting A clear, automatically generated topology map drastically reduces mean time to resolution. Instantly see how a failing Hostdisk impacts specific Persistent Volumes and Pods, allowing you to resolve issues before they escalate.