Deploy Grafana and Prometheus on Kubernetes in Minutes

Introduction

Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestration system that lets you deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. For monitoring and visualization, Grafana and Prometheus are useful tools. This article guides readers through installing and configuring Grafana and Prometheus on a Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

Before installing, understand the basic concepts of Grafana and Prometheus.

Grafana

Grafana visualizes monitoring data, providing dashboards that help understand performance, health, and trends. When integrated with Prometheus, it can display metrics collected by Prometheus.

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open‑source monitoring and alerting system that scrapes metrics from targets, stores them locally, and offers query and alert capabilities, making it suitable for cloud‑native environments.

Prepare Kubernetes Cluster

Obtain a lightweight cloud server and set up a Kubernetes cluster (for example, using k3s).

Create Deployment Manifests

Save the following YAML as grafpro.yaml and adjust parameters as needed.

kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1
metadata:
  name: &name grafpro
  labels:
    app: *name
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: *name
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: *name
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: grafana
          image: grafana/grafana
          securityContext:
            runAsUser: 0
          ports:
            - containerPort: 3000
          volumeMounts:
            - name: *name
              subPath: grafana
              mountPath: /var/lib/grafana
        - name: prometheus
          image: prom/prometheus
          securityContext:
            runAsUser: 0
          ports:
            - containerPort: 9090
          volumeMounts:
            - name: *name
              subPath: etc
              mountPath: /etc/prometheus
            - name: *name
              subPath: prometheus
              mountPath: /prometheus
      volumes:
        - name: *name
          hostPath:
            path: /srv/grafpro
            type: DirectoryOrCreate
---
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: &name grafpro
  labels:
    app: *name
spec:
  selector:
    app: *name
  ports:
    - name: grafana
      port: 3000
      targetPort: 3000
    - name: prometheus
      port: 9090
      targetPort: 9090
---
kind: Ingress
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: &name grafpro
  annotations:
    traefik.ingress.kubernetes.io/router.entrypoints: web,websecure
spec:
  rules:
    - host: grafana.example.org
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: *name
                port:
                  name: grafana
    - host: prometheus.example.org
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: *name
                port:
                  name: prometheus
  tls:
    - secretName: default

Save the following shell script as grafpro.sh and modify the variables GRAFPRO_STORAGE, GRAFANA_DOMAIN, and PROMETHEUS_DOMAIN accordingly.

export GRAFPRO_STORAGE=${GRAFPRO_STORAGE:-"/srv/grafpro"}

export GRAFANA_DOMAIN=${GRAFPRO_DOMAIN:-"grafana.example.org"}
export PROMETHEUS_DOMAIN=${PROMETHEUS_DOMAIN:-"grafana.example.org"}

mkdir -p $GRAFPRO_STORAGE/etc

cat <<EOF >$GRAFPRO_STORAGE/etc/prometheus.yml
global:
  scrape_interval: 5s
  scrape_timeout: 5s
  evaluation_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: prometheus
    static_configs:
      - targets:
          - 127.0.0.1:9090
EOF

cat grafpro.yaml | \
  sed "s#/srv/grafpro#$GRAFPRO_STORAGE#g" | \
  sed "s#grafana.example.org#$GRAFANA_DOMAIN#g" | \
  sed "s#prometheus.example.org#$PROMETHEUS_DOMAIN#g" | \
  kubectl apply -f -

Deploy Grafana and Prometheus

SSH into the server and run:

chmod +x grafpro.sh
./grafpro.sh

Test and Verify

Grafana

Open http://grafana.example.org in a browser, log in with username admin and password admin, change the password when prompted, then configure the Prometheus data source at http://127.0.0.1:9090 and import the “Prometheus 2.0 Stats” dashboard.

Prometheus

Open http://prometheus.example.org to access the query UI. In production, enable Basic Auth to protect the data.