Prometheus Stack
The Prometheus stack typically includes several components that work together to provide comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities for your infrastructure and applications. Here’s a table outlining the core components of the Prometheus stack:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Prometheus | Time-series database and monitoring tool that collects and stores metrics from various sources. It serves as the core of the stack. |
| Alertmanager | Handles alerts generated by Prometheus and manages their routing, deduplication, and notification to various alerting channels (e.g., email, Slack). |
| Node Exporter | A Prometheus exporter for collecting hardware and OS-level metrics from individual nodes in your cluster (e.g., CPU, memory, disk usage). |
| Exporters (e.g., Prometheus Blackbox Exporter, SNMP Exporter) | Exporters are small applications that expose metrics in a format Prometheus can scrape. They are used to collect specialized metrics from various services and systems. |
| Grafana | A popular open-source dashboard and visualization platform that integrates with Prometheus to create and display custom dashboards and graphs. |
| Pushgateway | Allows for the collection of metrics from batch jobs or other short-lived processes that cannot be scraped directly by Prometheus. It acts as an intermediary between these jobs and Prometheus. |
| Prometheus Operator | An operator that simplifies the management and operation of Prometheus, Alertmanager, and related resources in Kubernetes clusters. |
| Thanos (Optional) | An extension to Prometheus that provides long-term storage, global query view, and horizontal scalability for Prometheus. It’s often used for large-scale or federated deployments. |
Methods of Prometheus Deployment in Kubernetes
1. Prometheus Operator
The Prometheus Operator uses Kubernetes custom resources to simplify the deployment and configuration of Prometheus, Alertmanager, and related monitoring components.
URL – https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator
2. kube-prometheus
kube-prometheus provides example configurations for a complete cluster monitoring stack based on Prometheus and the Prometheus Operator. This includes deployment of multiple Prometheus and Alertmanager instances, metrics exporters such as the node_exporter for gathering node metrics, scrape target configuration linking Prometheus to various metrics endpoints, and example alerting rules for notification of potential issues in the cluster.
URL – https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus
3. helm chart
The prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack helm chart provides a similar feature set to kube-prometheus. This chart is maintained by the Prometheus community. For more information, please see the chart’s readme
URL – https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack
4. kube-prometheus
If you want the whole stack, you must try kube-prometheus. This Components included in this package:
- The Prometheus Operator
- Highly available Prometheus
- Highly available Alertmanager
- Prometheus node-exporter
- Prometheus Adapter for Kubernetes Metrics APIs
- kube-state-metrics
- Grafana
URL – https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus
$ git clone https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus
$ cd kube-prometheus
$ ls manifests/setup/
$ kubectl apply --server-side -f manifests/setup
$ kubectl wait --for condition=Established --all CustomResourceDefinition --namespace=monitoring
$ kubectl apply -f manifests/
$ kubectl get ns
$ kubectl get all -n monitoring
$ kubectl patch svc grafana --type='json' -p '[{"op":"replace","path":"/spec/type","value":"NodePort"}]' -nmonitoring
$ kubectl get all -n monitoring
$ kubectl --namespace monitoring port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 svc/grafana 3000
http://34.207.57.210:3000/
admin
adminPrometheus STACK Deployment Using Kube Prometheus
Prometheus & Grafana Deployment Using Helm Chart
Configure Data Sources and Dashboards in Grafana
- Log in to Grafana using the default credentials (admin/admin).
- Add Prometheus as a data source:
- Click on the gear icon (⚙️) in the left sidebar.
- Select “Data Sources.”
- Click on “Add data source.”
- Choose “Prometheus.”
- Configure the Prometheus URL (http://prometheus-server.monitoring.svc.cluster.local) and save.
- Import or create dashboards in Grafana to visualize your Kubernetes cluster’s metrics. You can find pre-built dashboards for Kubernetes and Prometheus in the Grafana dashboard marketplace.
Reference
- https://prometheus-operator.dev/
- https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/kubernetes-monitoring/configuration/configure-infrastructure-manually/prometheus/prometheus-operator/
I’m Rajesh Kumar, a DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering expert passionate about sharing practical knowledge, real-world experiences, and industry best practices. I have worked at Cotocus and regularly write about technology, travel, investing, health, product reviews, and digital marketing through my various platforms.
I publish technical articles at DevOps School, travel stories at Holiday Landmark, stock market insights at Stocks Mantra, health and fitness guidance at My Medic Plus, product reviews at TrueReviewNow, and SEO and digital marketing strategies at Wizbrand.
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