Lab K205 - Monitoring setup with HELM

In this lab, you are going to install and configure helm, and in turns, use it to configure a monitoring system for kubernetes using prometheus and grafana stack.

Installing Helm (version 3)

To install helm version 3 on Linux or MacOS, you can follow following instructions.

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

You could further refer to Official HELM Install Instructions for alternative options.

Verify the installtion is successful,

helm --help
helm version

Deploy Prometheus Stack with HELM

Read about kube-prometheus-stack 33.1.0 · prometheus/prometheus-community chart at artifacthub.io

Add helm repository using ,

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

Download the chart as,

cd ~
helm fetch --untar prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

Change into the charts directory

cd kube-prometheus-stack/
ls

Deploy prometheus stack as,

kubectl create ns monitoring
helm install prom -n monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

Validate

helm list -A

kubectl get all -n monitoring
kubectl get pods,svc -n monitoring

Customising Prometheus Configurations

To update the Grafana service to use NodePort configurations, upgrade the helm release by setting up customized properties as,

helm upgrade prom -n monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
  --set grafana.service.type=NodePort \
  --set grafana.service.nodePort=30200

Validate

helm list -A

kubectl get svc -n monitoring

You should see new revision of monitoring stack deployed, and Grafana service changed to NodePort.

Note down the node port and access Grafana with

http://IPADDRESS:30200

remember to replace node name/ip address and node port as actual.

Login using

User : admin
Pass: prom-operator

Once logged in, you should be able to browse and view Grafana dashboards from Dashboards menu.

An example dashboard is as follows,

You could further explore various Grafana dashboards and configurations.

Uninstalling the App with HELM

Once you are done experiementing and learning, you could uninstall the application stack that you earlier installed with helm easily.

To uninstall prometheus and grafana stack, begin by listing it

helm list -A
helm uninstall -n monitoring prom

This should clean up everything that was deployed with helm earlier.

Summary

In this lab, we not only learnt about HELM, a kubernetes package manager, but also have setup a sophisticated health monitoring system with prometheus and grafana.