Tutorial: Installing and Using Prometheus in Kubernetes

Posted on by Aditya Bhuyan
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This article will lead you through installing and configuring Prometheus, a popular open-source monitoring and alerting toolset, in a Kubernetes context. Prometheus is extensively used for cloud-native applications since it is built to monitor and gather metrics from many services and systems. This post will walk you through setting up Prometheus to successfully monitor your Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following prerequisites in place:

  1. A running Kubernetes cluster.
  2. kubectl command-line tool installed and configured.
  3. Helm installed in your Kubernetes cluster for easy package management.

Step 1: Setting Up Prometheus

In this step, we will deploy Prometheus to your Kubernetes cluster.

1.1. Create a Namespace

Let’s start by creating a Kubernetes namespace for Prometheus:

  1. kubectl create namespace prometheus

1.2. Deploy Prometheus with Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that makes it easy to deploy complex applications. We will use Helm to deploy Prometheus.

  1. helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
  2. helm repo update
  3. helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus --namespace prometheus

Prometheus Helm chart provides default configurations, which are suitable for a basic setup.

Step 2: Accessing the Prometheus UI

To access the Prometheus web UI, you can set up a port-forward to the Prometheus server:

  1. kubectl port-forward -n prometheus prometheus-prometheus-server-0 9090

Now you can access the Prometheus web UI at http://localhost:9090. Here, you can explore metrics, query data, and create custom alerts.

Step 3: Setting Up Prometheus Targets

Prometheus monitors services by scraping metrics endpoints. You need to specify which services Prometheus should scrape. This is done using Kubernetes ServiceMonitors.

3.1. Create a ServiceMonitor

Create a ServiceMonitor resource to define which services Prometheus should scrape. Here is an example ServiceMonitor for monitoring a sample app:

 apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
    kind: ServiceMonitor
    metadata:
      name: sample-app-monitor
      namespace: prometheus
    spec:
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          app: sample-app
      endpoints:
      - port: web

Apply the ServiceMonitor:

  1. kubectl apply -f sample-app-monitor.yaml

Step 4: Alerting with Prometheus

Prometheus allows you to set up alerts based on the collected metrics.

4.1. Create Alerting Rules

You can define alerting rules in a PrometheusRule resource. Here is an example of a rule that alerts when the sample app’s error rate is high:

 groups:
    - name: example
      rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: |
          rate(http_server_requests_total{job=\"sample-app\", status=\"500\"}[5m])
          /
          rate(http_server_requests_total{job=\"sample-app\"}[5m]) > 0.01
        for: 10m
        labels:
          severity: page
        annotations:
          summary: High error rate on {{ $labels.instance }}

Apply the PrometheusRule:

  1. kubectl apply -f sample-app-alert-rules.yaml

4.2. Configuring Alertmanager

Prometheus sends alerts to an Alertmanager, which can route them to various receivers, like email, Slack, or a webhook.

Here’s a basic Alertmanager configuration:

  1. route:
  2. group_by: [\'alertname\', \'job\']
  3. group_wait: 30s
  4. group_interval: 5m
  5. repeat_interval: 12h
  6. receiver: \'slack\'
  8. receivers:
  9. - name: \'slack\'
  10. slack_configs:
  11. - send_resolved: true
  12. title: \'Alert\'
  13. text: \'{{ .CommonAnnotations.summary }}\'
  14. api_url: \'https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/SLACK/WEBHOOK\'

Apply the Alertmanager configuration:

  1. kubectl apply -f alertmanager-config.yaml

Step 5: Advanced Configurations

5.1. Storage Configuration

In production, it’s essential to configure persistent storage for Prometheus to ensure data durability.

5.2. Node Exporter and Other Exporters

You can set up Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, and other exporters to collect more specific metrics.

5.3. Remote Write and Remote Read

To scale Prometheus horizontally, consider configuring remote write and remote read to use a remote storage solution like Thanos or Cortex.

Step 6: Clean Up

Remember to clean up any resources you created during this tutorial when you no longer need them.

Conclusion

Prometheus is a robust monitoring and alerting tool that may assist you in maintaining the health of your Kubernetes applications and infrastructure. Prometheus allows you to gather and analyse numerous metrics, set up alarms, and obtain insights into the behaviour of your system. This article will provide you a basic grasp of how to setup Prometheus in a Kubernetes system.

Consult the official Prometheus documentation and investigate further subjects like as Grafana integration, custom exporters, and long-term storage options to continue investigating and exploiting Prometheus efficiently.

Please keep in mind that this tutorial is only a starting point; you may need to modify it to fit your individual use case and requirements.

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