Practical Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana (Part I)

Installing Prometheus + Grafana via Helm in 5 Minutes

Prometheus at Scale: Architecture Considerations

In August 2018, Prometheus joined Kubernetes as the second project to graduate from CNCF and solidified itself as the de facto standard for open source monitoring tool for Kubernetes. From commercial offerings from Sysdig and Weaveworks to Prometheus operator charts from CoreOS and Bitnami, users now have more choices than before to install and deploy Prometheus onto Kubernetes. With so many options, how should one deploy Prometheus for scale?

Operators vs. Helm

If you aren’t familiar with operators, they are software extensions to Kubernetes that package together application-specific custom resources and configurations. For a monitoring bundle that often includes Prometheus (server, alertmanager, push gateway) and Grafana, using a Prometheus operator from CoreOS or Bitnami provides preconfigured alerts and dashboards. It’s a matter of preference to use CoreOS’s kube-prometheus operator, which uses ksonnet or the prometheus-operator Helm chart.

There are some known issues for using the prometheus-operator on a private GKE cluster, so if you don’t want to change firewall settings or prefer Bitnami’s…