Kubernetes Monitoring Guide: Prometheus Architecture, Grafana Dashboards & Alerts

📊 Introduction

Visibility is critical in Kubernetes environments. Prometheus collects metrics, while Grafana transforms them into actionable dashboards, enabling proactive monitoring and alerting.

🔍 Prometheus Architecture

Metric scraping via HTTP

Pull-based data collection

Time-series storage

Alerting via Alertmanager

🚀 Installing Prometheus

Most clusters use:

Prometheus Operator

kube-prometheus-stack (Helm)

helm install monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

📈 Grafana Dashboards

Grafana provides:

Node CPU & memory metrics

Pod health and restarts

API server latency

Namespace-level views

Import ready-made dashboards from Grafana Labs.

🚨 Alerting Rules Example

- alert: HighPodCPU

  expr: sum(rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total[5m])) > 80

  for: 5m

Alerts integrate with Slack, email, PagerDuty.

🧠 Best Practices

✅ Use RBAC to restrict monitoring access

✅ Scale Prometheus for large clusters

✅ Use recording rules for performance

✅ Separate infra and app metrics

✅ Retain metrics based on business needs

🏁 Conclusion

Prometheus and Grafana form the backbone of Kubernetes observability. Together, they provide deep insights, proactive alerting, and operational confidence for DevOps teams.

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