Monitoring Stack with Prometheus and Grafana

Description

This documentation covers the setup of a monitoring stack with Prometheus and Grafana on a Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

Prerequisites

• A working Kubernetes cluster
• kubectl configured to connect to your cluster
• curl for downloading Helm
• helm package manager for Kubernetes

Step 1: Install Helm

Helm is used to manage Kubernetes applications. Install Helm using one of the following methods:

Option 1: Install Helm Using curl (Recommended)

curl <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3> | bash

Option 2: Install Helm Using Package Managers

For Ubuntu/Debian:

# Add the Helm GPG key
curl <https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc> | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg > /dev/null
 
# Install necessary transport packages
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https --yes
 
# Add Helm repository
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg] <https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/> all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
 
# Update package manager and install Helm
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install helm

Step 2: Install Prometheus

Prometheus will be installed from the prometheus-community Helm repository.

1. Add the Prometheus Helm Chart Repository:

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

2. Create a Custom Namespace for monitoring (optional but recommended):

   kubectl create namespace monitoring

3. Install Prometheus in the monitoring namespace:

   helm install --namespace monitoring prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus

Step 3: Install Grafana

Grafana will be installed from the grafana Helm repository.

1. Add the Grafana Helm Chart Repository:

   helm repo add grafana <https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts>
   helm repo update

2. Install Grafana in the monitoring namespace:

   helm install --namespace monitoring grafana grafana/grafana --set release-namespace=monitoring

Step 4: Access Grafana

To access Grafana, retrieve the default password for the admin user.

kubectl get secret --namespace monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

This command decodes and displays the password for Grafana’s admin user.