Monitoring Setup

Prometheus and Grafana monitoring stack for the Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster with Traefik Gateway API configured
• cert-manager with Let’s Encrypt ClusterIssuer
• Helm installed

Installation

Prerequisites

Add the required Helm repos (needed for helm dependency update):

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

Option A: Argo CD (recommended)

Argo CD will keep the stack in sync with the repo automatically.

# 1. Create the Grafana admin password secret (one-time, manual step)
kubectl create secret generic monitoring-grafana-admin \
  -n monitoring \
  --from-literal=admin-user=admin \
  --from-literal=admin-password=<your-password>
 
# 2. Apply the ArgoCD Application
kubectl apply -f infra/monitoring/argocd-application.yaml

Argo CD will then fetch the chart from the repo, run helm dependency update, and deploy.

Option B: Manual Helm

# 1. Create the Grafana admin password secret (one-time, manual step)
kubectl create secret generic monitoring-grafana-admin \
  -n monitoring \
  --from-literal=admin-user=admin \
  --from-literal=admin-password=<your-password>
 
# 2. Fetch chart dependencies
helm dependency update infra/monitoring/chart
 
# 3. Install (or upgrade) the full monitoring stack
helm upgrade --install monitoring infra/monitoring/chart \
  -n monitoring --create-namespace \
  -f infra/monitoring/chart/values.prod.yaml

Access

• Grafana: https://grafana.app.example.com  # Replace with actual hostname
  • Username: admin
  • Password: (set during installation)

Included Components

The chart installs:

• Prometheus: Metrics collection and storage
• Grafana: Visualization and dashboards
• Alertmanager: Alert routing and notifications
• Node Exporter: Host-level metrics
• kube-state-metrics: Kubernetes object metrics
• Loki: Log aggregation and storage
• Alloy: Log/metrics/traces collection agent (forwards pod logs to Loki)

Pre-configured Dashboards

Grafana comes with dashboards for:

• Kubernetes cluster overview
• Node resources (CPU, memory, disk, network)
• Pod resources
• Namespace resources
• Persistent volumes
• API server metrics

Logs (Loki)

Logs from all pods are collected by Alloy and stored in Loki. Query them in Grafana under Explore → Loki using LogQL, e.g.:

{namespace="default"} |= "error"

Useful Loki Dashboards

Import from Grafana.com :

Adding Custom Dashboards

Import dashboards from Grafana.com :

1. Go to Grafana → Dashboards → Import
2. Enter dashboard ID (e.g., 15757 for Kubernetes views)
3. Select Prometheus data source
4. Click Import

Alerting (Optional)

Configure Alertmanager for notifications:

kubectl edit secret alertmanager-monitoring-kube-prometheus-alertmanager -n monitoring

Add Slack, email, or other notification channels in the alertmanager.yaml config.