How to setup monitoring on AKS Cluster using Prometheus and Grafana | Setup monitoring on AKS Cluster using Prometheus and Grafana

How to setup monitoring on AKS Cluster using Prometheus and Grafana?

Prometheus Architecture

What is Prometheus?

• Prometheus is an open source monitoring tool
• Provides out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities for the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. It can monitor servers and databases as well.
• Collects and stores metrics as time-series data, recording information with a timestamp 
• It is based on pull and collects metrics from targets by scraping metrics HTTP endpoints.

What is Grafana?

• Grafana is an open source visualization and analytics tool. 
• It allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored.

Key components:

    1. Prometheus server - Processes and stores metrics data

    2. Alert Manager - Sends alerts to any systems/channels

    3. Grafana - Visualize scraped data in UI

Installation Method:

The are are many ways you can setup Prometheus and Grafana. You can install in following ways:

1. Create all configuration files of both Prometheus and Grafana and execute them in right order.

2. Prometheus Operator - to simplify and automate the configuration and management of the Prometheus monitoring stack running on a Kubernetes cluster

3. Helm chart (Recommended) - Using helm to install Prometheus Operator including Grafana

Why to use Helm?

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm simplifies the installation of all components in one command. Install using Helm is recommended as you will not be missing any configuration steps and very efficient. 

Pre-requisites:

• Install Azure CLI on your local machine
• Install Helm3

Create AKS Cluster

Make sure you are login to Azure portal first.

az login

enter your Microsoft credentials.

Create a resource group first

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location southcentralus

Create AKS cluster with 2 worker nodes

az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --node-count 2 --enable-addons monitoring

Display Details of Cluster

az aks show --name myAKSCluster --resource-group myResourceGroup

The above command will display Cluster details.

Connect to the cluster

az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --overwrite-existing

To verify the connection to your cluster, use the kubectl get command to return a list of the cluster nodes.

kubectl get nodes

 

 

Implementation steps

We need to add the Helm Stable Charts for your local client. Execute the below command:

helm repo add stable https://charts.helm.sh/stable

# Add prometheus Helm repo

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

# Search for newly installed repositories

helm repo list

helm search repo prometheus-community

Prometheus and grafana helm chart moved to kube prometheus stack

Create Prometheus namespace
kubectl create namespace prometheus

Install kube-prometheus-stack

Below is helm command to install kube-prometheus-stack. The helm repo kube-stack-prometheus (formerly prometheus-operator) comes with a grafana deployment embedded.

helm install stable prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack -n prometheus

Lets check if prometheus and grafana pods are running already

kubectl get pods -n prometheus

kubectl get svc -n prometheus

This confirms that prometheus and grafana have been installed successfully using Helm.

In order to make prometheus and grafana available outside the cluster, use LoadBalancer or NodePort instead of ClusterIP.

Edit Prometheus Service

kubectl edit svc stable-kube-prometheus-sta-prometheus -n prometheus

Edit Grafana Service

kubectl edit svc stable-grafana -n prometheus

Verify if service is changed to LoadBalancer and also to get the Load Balancer URL.

kubectl get svc -n prometheus

Access Grafana UI in the browser

Get the URL from the above screenshot and put in the browser

UserName: admin

Password: prom-operator

Create Dashboard in Grafana

In Grafana, we can create various kinds of dashboards as per our needs.

How to Create Kubernetes Monitoring Dashboard?

For creating a dashboard to monitor the cluster:

Click '+' button on left panel and select ‘Import’.

Enter 12740 dashboard id under Grafana.com Dashboard.

Click ‘Load’.

Select ‘Prometheus’ as the endpoint under prometheus data sources drop down.

Click ‘Import’.

This will show monitoring dashboard for all cluster nodes

How to Create Kubernetes Cluster Monitoring Dashboard?

For creating a dashboard to monitor the cluster:

Click '+' button on left panel and select ‘Import’.

Enter 3119 dashboard id under Grafana.com Dashboard.

Click ‘Load’.

Select ‘Prometheus’ as the endpoint under prometheus data sources drop down.

Click ‘Import’.

This will show monitoring dashboard for all cluster nodes

Create POD Monitoring Dashboard

For creating a dashboard to monitor the cluster:

Click '+' button on left panel and select ‘Import’.

Enter 6417 dashboard id under Grafana.com Dashboard.

Click ‘Load’.

Select ‘Prometheus’ as the endpoint under prometheus data sources drop down.

Click ‘Import’.

This will show monitoring dashboard for all cluster nodes.

Clean up AKS Cluster

To avoid Azure charges, you should clean up the resources created. We can use the az group delete command to remove the resource group, AKS cluster, and all related resources. 

az group delete --name myResourceGroup --yes --no-wait