Master Kubernetes Monitoring with Grafana Dashboards: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Introduction

Amid the wave of digital transformation, Kubernetes has become a core part of enterprise IT architecture, and Grafana provides a powerful open‑source platform for monitoring and analyzing its dynamic resources.

Prerequisites

Prometheus installed

Grafana installed

Prometheus already collecting metrics

If these components are not yet set up, refer to a monitoring system collection.

Recording Rules

Prepare

/tmp/recording_rules.yml

with the content from

https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/rules.yaml

. Adjust the

job

label to match the Prometheus target name (e.g.,

job="k8s/apiserver"

instead of

job="kube-apiserver"

).

<code>$ kubectl create configmap prometheus -n kube-system --from-file=/tmp/recording_rules.yml --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -
configmap/prometheus configured</code>

Kubernetes Monitoring Dashboards

Import the following dashboard JSON files into Grafana. Minor adjustments may be required for each panel.

etcd: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/etcd/dashboards/etcd.json

apiserver: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/dashboards/apiserver.json

controller‑manager: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/dashboards/controller-manager.json

scheduler: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/dashboards/scheduler.json

kubelet: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/dashboards/kubelet.json

proxy: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/kubernetes/dashboards/proxy.json

calico: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.27.4/manifests/grafana-dashboards.yaml

coredns: https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website/blob/master/assets/coredns/dashboards/coredns.json

Import Procedure

Use Grafana’s dashboard import UI (shown in the images below) to load each JSON file.

Dashboard Showcase

Below are screenshots of the imported dashboards for each component.

Reference Documents

https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/website

https://monitoring.mixins.dev/

Conclusion

Combining Kubernetes with Grafana greatly improves monitoring efficiency, accuracy, and data visualization. By following this guide, you can master Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes clusters, making operations more efficient and intelligent, and helping you build more stable and high‑performance systems.