Building a CD Pipeline Using LKE (Part 11): Prometheus and Grafana

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Slide deck: Cloud Native Continuous Deployment with GitLab, Helm, and Linode Kubernetes Engine: Prometheus and Grafana (Slide #163)

Prometheus and Grafana

Going beyond metrics-server, this guide goes over collecting more advanced metrics using Prometheus (to capture the metrics) and Grafana (to display the metrics within a user interface).

Navigate the Series

• Main guide: Building a Continuous Deployment Pipeline Using LKE
• Previous section: Part 10: Installing metrics-server
• Next section: Part 12: cert-manager

Presentation Text

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Prometheus and Grafana

• What if we want metrics retention, view graphs, trends?
• A very popular combo is Prometheus+Grafana:
  • Prometheus as the “metrics engine”
  • Grafana to display comprehensive dashboards
• Prometheus also has an alert-manager component to trigger alerts (we won’t talk about that one)

Installing Prometheus and Grafana

• A complete metrics stack needs at least:
  • the Prometheus server (collects metrics and stores them efficiently)
  • a collection of exporters (exposing metrics to Prometheus)
  • Grafana
  • a collection of Grafana dashboards (building them from scratch is tedious)
• The Helm chart kube-prometheus-stack combines all these elements
• … So we’re going to use it to deploy our metrics stack!

Installing kube-prometheus-stack

• Let’s install that stack directly from its repo (without doing helm repo add first)

• Otherwise, keep the same naming strategy:

  helm upgrade kube-prometheus-stack kube-prometheus-stack --install \
    --namespace kube-prometheus-stack --create-namespace \
    --repo https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
  

• This will take a minute…

• Then check what was installed:

  kubectl get all --namespace kube-prometheus-stack
  

Exposing Grafana

• Let’s create an Ingress for Grafana

  kubectl create ingress --namespace kube-prometheus-stack grafana \
  --rule=grafana.cloudnative.party/*=kube-prometheus-stack-grafana:80
  

  (as usual, make sure to use your domain name above)

• Connect to Grafana (remember that the DNS record might take a few minutes to come up)

Grafana credentials

• What could the login and password be?

• Let’s look at the Secrets available in the namespace:

  kubectl get secrets --namespace kube-prometheus-stack
  

• There is a kube-prometheus-stack-grafana that looks promising!

• Decode the Secret:

  kubectl get secret --namespace kube-prometheus-stack \
  kube-prometheus-stack-grafana -o json | jq '.data | map_values(@base64d)'
  

• If you don’t have the jq tool mentioned above, don’t worry…

Grafana credentials

• What could the login and password be?

• Let’s look at the Secrets available in the namespace:

  kubectl get secrets --namespace kube-prometheus-stack
  

• There is a kube-prometheus-stack-grafana that looks promising!

• Decode the Secret:

  kubectl get secret --namespace kube-prometheus-stack \
  kube-prometheus-stack-grafana -o json | jq '.data | map_values(@base64d)'
  

• If you don’t have the jq tool mentioned above, don’t worry…

• The login/password is hardcoded to admin/prom-operator 😬

Grafana dashboards

• Once logged in, click on the “Dashboards” icon on the left (it’s the one that looks like four squares)
• Then click on the “Manage” entry
• Then click on “Kubernetes / Compute Resources / Cluster”
• This gives us a breakdown of resource usage by Namespace
• Feel free to explore the other dashboards!