Resource group is a collection of cluster resources of a specific type that share specific characteristics. Resource groups help enforce policies and monitor the performance of resources in a single global namespace or across your entire organization.

A resource group provides a set of filters, or conditions, for you to retrieve and manage a specific subset of resources for your needs. For example, a resource group can define a condition for the service name to begin with cart. Another example is a resource group that defines a condition for nodes that run only a specific service. Only resources that satisfy the conditions defined for a resource group are included in that group. You can have multiple conditions in a resource group, combining them with the AND operator.

You can create these kinds of resource group to collect and manage objects that meet your specific criteria:

  • Service groups

  • Node groups

Resources groups in Tanzu Service Mesh are used for two main purposes.

You use resource groups to observe performance metrics for an appropriate collection of resources. For example, you want to monitor the performance of all nodes running in your California-based clusters or the performance of only the pricing services within your service mesh. For this purpose, you create a node group and a service group defining the appropriate conditions (the cluster is located in California and the service name begins with pricing in our examples). After a resource group is created, you can monitor relevant performance metrics (such as requests per seconds, latency metrics, and error rate) for the group collectively from the resource group details page.

You can also use resource groups to create and enforce policies. For example, you work for a financial institution that has office locations in New York and Beijing. You have created a resource group for each of these locations. You have also created an authorization policy defining that the employees in the Beijing office cannot access the resources in the New York resource group, whereas the New York employees have access to these resources.

You can add service level objectives (SLOs) on a resource group. You can then use these SLOs to track violations over time. If a service in the resource group exceeds Service Level Indicator limits, the violation is clearly visible in the Tanzu Service Mesh Console user interface, and the value of the error budget is updated.