How to Deploy a Redis Exporter on Kubernetes for Prometheus Monitoring

Overview

This article explains how to expose Redis metrics to Prometheus by deploying a redis-exporter container together with a Redis pod in a Kubernetes cluster. It covers the necessary YAML manifests, required annotations, command‑line steps, and how to import a Grafana dashboard to visualize the collected metrics.

Kubernetes Manifests

The following Deployment creates two containers in the same pod: the official Redis image and the oliver006/redis_exporter sidecar.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: redis
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: redis
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: redis
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: redis
        image: redis:4
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 100Mi
        ports:
        - containerPort: 6379
      - name: redis-exporter
        image: oliver006/redis_exporter:latest
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 100Mi
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9121
---
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: redis
  namespace: kube-system
  annotations:
    prometheus.io/scrape: "true"
    prometheus.io/port: "9121"
spec:
  selector:
    app: redis
  ports:
  - name: redis
    port: 6379
    targetPort: 6379
  - name: prom
    port: 9121
    targetPort: 9121

The Service adds two ports: the standard Redis port (6379) and the exporter port (9121). The annotations prometheus.io/scrape="true" and prometheus.io/port="9121" tell Prometheus to scrape metrics from this service automatically.

Applying the Configuration

After saving the above content to redis.yaml, apply it with: kubectl apply -f redis.yaml This creates the pod with both containers and the service with the proper annotations. If you modify the file later, re‑run the same command to update the resources.

Grafana Dashboard

To visualize the Redis metrics, import the provided Grafana dashboard JSON file named Redis Cluster-1571393212519.json. The file can be downloaded from the following Baidu Pan link (extraction code: gayx).

After importing, the Grafana UI will display charts such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and Redis command statistics, confirming that the exporter is correctly exposing metrics.

Resulting Monitoring View

The following screenshot shows the Grafana dashboard after the exporter is scraped by Prometheus: