helm-charts VS prometheus-operator

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.

The project repository for Prometheus-operator can be found here, The repo defines the CRDs and the controller. You can follow this documentation for the installation. which will require the creation of metrics exporters, node exporters, scrape configurations, etc.

Personally I use kubernetes, k3s is kind of lightweight, with the Prometheus operator.

https://k3s.io/

https://prometheus-operator.dev/

Kubernetes is not for everyone and is far from perfect but you already use Docker and you seem to seek many features offered by Kubernetes.

I see that the operator is a community-run project. Does anybody have any experience (positive or negative) on running the operator itself? I wonder if it is more for multi-tenant Prometheus. For single tenant Prometheus collection, I guess the big gain is abstracting scrape config into ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor resources? Is there anything else that this makes much better?

But in all honesty if you’re on k8s you’re probably best served by the Prometheus operator. It’ll give you all that and more, easily.

Try some monitoring.

It’s a common pattern [1] how else can users override the child objects you’re controller creates?

1 https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator/b...

The Prometheus operator is this one https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator

At a minimum, you want to look at your metrics using the Prometheus Operator. You can write alerts for resource requests.

Prometheus Operator is an independent project from the Prometheus project. I know, it can lead to confusion. In the official README you can find short comparison. Basically, Prometheus Operator does what an operator should do - provides Kubernetes native deployment and management of Prometheus and related monitoring components like Grafana or Alert Manager.