unified-observability-k8s-kubecon VS helm-charts

NOTE: If you want to follow along to see the full Terraform source code, you can check it out here. Even though the source code is specific to the Observability-Landscape-as-Code use case, the main Terraform concepts in this blog post can be ported over to other scenarios.

Create a Kubernetes cluster (GKE) in Google Cloud using the Google Terraform Provider. This is defined in the k8s module in our repo.

Installation example for prometheus:

Prometheus can be deployed using the Prometheus Helm Chart. This helm chart contains a lot of features such as the already mentioned Push Gateway, Alert Manager and so on. For simplicity reasons of this tutorial I will not show all the Helm chart configuration but you can see a real example used by me here.

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!