Why use Prometheus for Kubernetes monitoring?
- Modern DevOps is becoming more and more complex to handle manually and therefore needs more automation. Typically, we have multiple servers that run our containerized applications, and there are hundreds of different processes running on that infrastructure. Here everything is interconnected, so maintaining such a setup to run smoothly and without application downtimes is very challenging. Imagine having such a complex infrastructure with loads of servers distributed over many locations and having no insight into what is happening on the hardware level or application level, like errors, response latency, hardware being down or overloaded, running out of resources, etc. In such complex infrastructure, more things can go wrong, When we have tons of services and applications deployed, any one of them can crash and cause the failure of other services, which only have so many moving pieces, and suddenly an application becomes unavailable to users, we must quickly identify exactly out of this hundred different things went wrong and that could be difficult and time-consuming if we start debugging the system manually.
- Let’s understand this with the help of specific examples, Let’s say that in our complex infrastructure, one specific server ran out of memory and kicked off a running container that was responsible for providing database sync between two database Pods in a Kubernetes cluster, that in turn caused those two database Pods to fail, that database was used by an authentication service that also stopped working because the database became unavailable and then application that depended on that authentication service couldn’t authenticate users. Meanwhile in the User Interface the user gets an error saying “Login Failed”. It is really tough to know what actually went wrong when you don’t have any insight of what is going on inside the cluster. The only option we have is to start working backwards from there to find the cause and fix it.
- A monitoring tool can not only make this searching the problem process more efficient by constantly monitoring whether services are running, it can also identify problems before they even occur and alerts the system administrators responsible for that infrastructure to prevent that issue. For example in this case Prometheus would check regularly the status of memory usage on each server and when on one of the servers it spikes over for 70% for over an hour or keeps increasing notify about the risk that the memory on that server might soon run out.
Kubernetes Prometheus
With modern DevOps becoming more and more complex, monitoring and alerting stakeholders has become even more crucial for any microservice, and Prometheus is a tool to do the same. Prometheus is a completely open-sourced tool created to monitor highly dynamic container environments like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, etc. However, it can also be used in a traditional non-container infrastructure where you have just bare servers with applications deployed directly on them. In this article, we will learn what prometheus is. We will see why Prometheus is so important in such infrastructure. And what are some of its use cases?
Table of Content
- What is Prometheus Monitoring?
- Why use Prometheus for Kubernetes monitoring?
- Prometheus Architecture
- Key Terminologies
- Tutorial – Deploying Prometheus Monitoring in Kubernetes Cluster
- Step 1: Creating a Kubernetes Cluster
- Step 2: Installing Helm
- Step 3: Adding the Prometheus repository
- Step 4: Installing Prometheus
- Step 5: Checking all the resources installed
- Step 6: Expose the “prometheus-server” Service
- Advantages of Prometheus
- How Prometheus compares to other Kubernetes monitoring tools
- The challenges of Prometheus scaling and monitoring
- Increased management overhead for SREs and platform teams
- Prometheus Kubernetes Service Discovery
- Conclusion
- Kubernetes Prometheus – FAQ’s