What is Robusta?

Profile

Robusta's core is the automation engine that powers its infrastructure-as-code take on Kubernetes application maintenance. At a high level, the platform supports automations (also known as playbooks or runbooks) that respond to alerts. For instance, the system can investigate and remediate problems.

Robusta affords its users customization beyond the fact that it's open-source. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to automations: You can set up a runbook that triggers in response to anything from Prometheus alerts and Kubernetes resource changes to webhooks.

One neat feature is that Robusta builds on its own successes: The monitoring tools build on a runbook, so there are few limits to what you can tweak once you get the hang of things.

Focus

Most Robusta users fall into one of two groups. First, there are the K8 novices and enterprises that want to monitor clusters without spending tons of time defining and tweaking alerts. Depending on the complexity of the behaviors and workflows you'd like to support, there’s a high possibility that this category applies to your team.

The other major user group includes organizations that already run Kubernetes clusters with existing monitoring stacks. These users typically tend to have alerts in place and use Robusta to explore, remediate, and otherwise manage them.

Robust attempts to offer a solution that ticks all the boxes. You can install relatively rapidly via a Helm book, and doing so within an OpenShift or GitOps workflow usually only takes one extra step. Not only can automations trigger completely unrelated actions but they can also enrich existing Prometheus alerts with greater context. 

Robusta includes a CLI that might make for slightly easier runback experimentation and oversight. It also supports Python profiling, notification routing, and Java jmap troubleshooting, which could be useful when refining applications. 

On the flip side, getting the most out of the platform might not be as intuitive as it ought to be in light of how much Robusta can do. It's probably smart to read the docs fairly thoroughly before getting started, and remember that this tool will undoubtedly prove more useful after you’ve already got applications up and running.

Background

Robusta.dev, a startup, created Robusta. Today, all sizes of companies use it to monitor and power their Kubernetes oversight and automate error response – basically everything that happens post-deployment. Its user-base ranges from small startups that use managed clouds to large enterprises running OpenShift in-house.

Robusta main features

Automations engine

YAML-defined automations make things conceptually easier by being split into three parts: triggers, actions, and sinks. This clear delineation might lower the barrier to entry, especially when you’re hunting for convenient places to begin integrating your tooling.

Extensive actions library

There are more than 50 predefined Robusta actions to speed the process along. These include remediation, enhancement, and other task templates, so you can build something relatively complex in short order.

Unified timeline and change-tracking

Robusta's UI depicts alerts and changes across your Kubernetes clusters via a unified timeline. It also attempts to reduce noise by automatically organizing alerts and making it easier to evaluate which resources changed prior to events.