helm-charts VS lens

Building upon Bartłomiej Płotka's insightful blog on Prometheus and its passthrough agent mode, this post dives into implementing multi-cluster Prometheus support. Notably, the official inclusion of support in the widely-used kube-prometheus-stack came with the release in July 2023, making it easier to extend Prometheus monitoring across clusters.

The first thing you'll need, of course, is at least one backend to store metrics. So install Prometheus now:

For the request following, something like jeager https://www.jaegertracing.io/, because you are talking more about tracing than necessarily logging. For just monitoring, https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack would be the starting point, then it depends. Nginx gives metrics out of the box, then you can pull in the dashboard like https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/14314-kubernetes-nginx-ingress-controller-nextgen-devops-nirvana/ , or full metal with something like service mesh monitoring which would provably fulfil most of the requirements

kube-prometheus-stack is a Helm chart that contains several components to monitor the Kubernetes cluster, along with Grafana dashboards Grafana Dashboards to visualize the data. This option will be used in this article.

This one I highly recommend: https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack

We use kube-prometheus-stack for metrics and have added the K8s views dashboards from grafana-dashboards-kubernetes. You should check out the k8s-views-global dashboard. I believe it's just what you are looking for.

You should take a look at "kube-prometheus-stack". It not only includes prometheus, node-exporter and Grafana but also a ton of preconfigured alerts and dashboards. Will save you a lot of work!

Since their are different ways to install what exactly did you install? Vanilla charts , stack, operator? https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts

https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/mai...

Good luck! It's a lot.

Lens

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Indeed you can, with several "paid" features removed, like log tailing and pod shells. They deliberately hobbled the product. If you want to use Lens, my advice is pay for the supported version.

yes I know there is lens, but it does not allow me to see logs of multiple pods at same time and what is even more important it is not friendly for ephemeral clusters - in my case with help of kind I am recreating whole cluster each time from scratch

Let's wait for few seconds for the pods to become green, I am using Lens, it's awesome btw.

You probably don't need Rancher unless you need a GUI or manage multiple clusters, Lens or k9s might be a better fit for your use case.

`openlens` is now preferred over `Lens`, it has everything you need and none of the fluff that Lens wants to charge you for.