Pivotal Platform architecture

This post is part one of a four-part series about monitoring the health and performance of Pivotal Platform (formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry), focusing specifically on the Pivotal Application Service runtime. The Pivotal Platform is now part of VMware Tanzu following VMware’s acquisition of Pivotal in late 2019. The Pivotal Application Service (PAS)—a distribution of the open source Cloud Foundry Application Runtime—is one of two runtime environments available for Pivotal Platform, with the other being Enterprise Pivotal Container Service (PKS). The platform is aimed at enterprise users and offers additional features and services from Pivotal and third parties for installing and operating Cloud Foundry as well as to expand its capabilities and make it easier to use. The primary components of a typical Pivotal Platform cluster using PAS are: BOSH/the Ops Manager (deployment automation), the User Account and Authentication server (identity management), the Gorouter (application and system routing), the Cloud Controller (application staging and running), Diego (application execution and runtime), and Loggregator (logs and metric aggregation). Monitoring Pivotal Platform is vital for ensuring that applications are running optimally. Key metrics operators will want to collect and monitor in Pivotal Platform include system-level resource metrics, platform metrics from PAS components, application logs, and metrics coming from installed services.