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Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus — A Personal Project

Welcome to my Prometheus on Kubernetes documentation project — a personal initiative to showcase deep expertise in monitoring, observability, and cloud-native systems at scale.

This site is structured as a complete guide to running Prometheus in Kubernetes, blending fundamentals, hands-on examples, best practices, and advanced topics. It is designed for engineers, SREs, and learners who want to understand Kubernetes monitoring from zero to production-grade scale.

Project Purpose

  • Demonstrate expert knowledge in Prometheus, Kubernetes, and cloud-native observability.
  • Provide a world-class learning resource tailored to Kubernetes users, assuming no prior experience.
  • Serve as a portfolio piece highlighting my skills in technical writing, system design, and DevOps practices.

Quick Overview of Prometheus on Kubernetes

Prometheus is the de-facto monitoring and alerting toolkit in Kubernetes that:

  • Collects metrics from nodes, pods, and services via service discovery.
  • Stores them in a purpose-built time-series database (TSDB).
  • Uses PromQL to query cluster and application metrics.
  • Sends alerts via Alertmanager.
  • Integrates seamlessly with Grafana for dashboards.

Getting Started

Jump into the Quick Start guide to see Kubernetes monitoring in action:

  • Deploy Prometheus on Kubernetes (Helm, Operator, or manifests).
  • Scrape metrics from nodes, pods, and system components.
  • Query cluster data using PromQL.
  • Build dashboards in Grafana.
  • Configure a basic alert in Alertmanager.

Architecture & Components

This project explains Kubernetes monitoring from the ground up:

  • Core Concepts → Metrics, exporters, service discovery, labels.
  • Prometheus Server → Scraping workloads and cluster components.
  • Alertmanager → Routing and managing cluster alerts.
  • Grafana → Visualizing cluster health and application metrics.
  • Scaling → Prometheus Operator, Thanos, Cortex, federation, long-term storage.

See detailed workflows in Architecture.

Documentation Roadmap

The guide follows a step-by-step learning path:

  • Quick Start → Deploy Prometheus in Kubernetes and scrape your first metrics.
  • Architecture → Understand internals, exporters, and service discovery.
  • PromQL & Features → Querying cluster/app data, defining alerts.
  • Scaling & Best Practices → HA setups, long-term storage, high-cardinality strategies.
  • About Me → My background, expertise, and contact info.

Example Use Cases

Prometheus in Kubernetes enables:

  • Cluster Monitoring → Node health, kubelet, API server, etcd.
  • Workload Monitoring → Pod metrics, deployments, HPA scaling signals.
  • Application Monitoring → Service SLIs, latency, error rates, traffic.
  • Alerting → Node pressure, pod crashes, SLA breaches, anomalies.

All use cases are illustrated with hands-on Kubernetes demos.

About This Project

This documentation is a personal showcase of Kubernetes monitoring expertise. It combines:

  • Deep Kubernetes integration knowledge
  • Hands-on best practices with Prometheus Operator & exporters
  • Clear explanations for beginners and advanced practitioners

License: MIT

Maintained by Sean Njela.