kube-prometheus-stack

Use the kube-prometheus-stack Helm chart to deploy both Prometheus and Grafana automatically. Prometheus scrapes pod metrics generated by cAdvisor and kube-state-metrics, which you then visualize by importing a pre-built Kubernetes dashboard in Grafana.

1. Deploy the Monitoring Stack

Using Helm is the easiest way to deploy everything required to your cluster.

bash
# Add the necessary Helm repositories
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

# Create a dedicated namespace and install the stack
kubectl create namespace monitoring
helm install prometheus-stack prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack --namespace monitoring

2. Access the Dashboards

To view your data, expose the services locally using port-forwarding:

Grafana

bash
# Forward Grafana to port 3000
kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-stack-grafana -n monitoring 3000:80

Navigate to http://localhost:3000. The default username is admin. Retrieve the auto-generated password by running:

kubectl get secret --namespace monitoring prometheus-stack-grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

Prometheus

bash
# Forward Prometheus to port 9090
kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-stack-kube-prome-prometheus -n monitoring 9090:9090

Navigate to http://localhost:9090 to run direct PromQL queries.

3. Visualize Pod Metrics in Grafana

Once logged into Grafana:

1. Go to Connections > Data Sources.
2. Add Prometheus and use the internal cluster URL http://cluster.local.
3. Go to Dashboards > Import.
4. Enter the Dashboard ID 6417 (Kubernetes Cluster) or 15760 (Node Exporter), select your Prometheus data source, and click Import.