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Kubernetes streamlines container orchestration across clouds, but its abstraction can hide critical insights into cluster health and resource usage. In this guide, we’ll explore essential monitoring concepts, built-in tools, and an advanced open-source stack using Prometheus and Grafana.

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Kubernetes Monitoring Overview

To maintain reliability and performance, monitor:
  • Cluster & Node Metrics: CPU, memory usage, availability, capacity
  • Deployment & Pod Status: Desired vs. running replicas, CrashLoopBackOff errors
  • Pod Resource Consumption: Requests and limits for CPU/memory
  • Application-Level Health: Latency, throughput, error rates
A major challenge is capturing and storing vast quantities of metrics to enable trend analysis and alerting over time.
Without persistent storage, short-lived metrics are lost and you miss critical events that could help diagnose incidents.

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Built-in Monitoring Tools

Kubernetes includes several basic monitoring components:
ToolFunctionLimitation
cAdvisorContainer resource collector in the kubeletNo long-term storage, trend analysis, or alerts
Metrics ServerAggregates CPU/memory from cAdvisor into Metrics APINo built-in dashboards or advanced queries
Kubernetes DashboardWeb UI for namespaces, workloads, and basic metricsReal-time only; no historical trend analysis
For production environments requiring SLA guarantees, these out-of-the-box tools are insufficient. Plan for a full monitoring stack.
Retrieve real-time metrics: 
# View node metrics
kubectl top nodes

# View pod metrics in a namespace
kubectl top pods -n <namespace>

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Advanced Open-Source Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

For comprehensive observability, combine Prometheus for metrics scraping/storage with Grafana for visualization and alerting.
The image is a diagram explaining Kubernetes monitoring, detailing the monitoring of clusters, nodes, deployments, pods, and applications, and listing tools like Prometheus and Grafana.
Follow these steps to deploy:
  1. Add and update Helm repos: 
    helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
  2. Install Prometheus: 
    helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus \
  --namespace monitoring --create-namespace
  3. Install Grafana: 
    helm install grafana prometheus-community/kube-grafana \
  --namespace monitoring
  4. Forward ports to access UIs: 
    # Grafana UI
kubectl port-forward svc/grafana 3000:80 -n monitoring

# Prometheus UI
kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-server 9090:80 -n monitoring
After first login to Grafana (default credentials admin/admin), immediately update the password and configure your data source.
With Prometheus scraping Kubernetes endpoints and Grafana connected:
  • Persist historical metrics for capacity planning
  • Build custom dashboards to visualize CPU, memory, and application metrics
  • Configure alerts in Prometheus Alertmanager to detect anomalies
Thank you for reading this lesson!

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