Master Prometheus: Step-by-Step Deployment and Verification on Kubernetes

With the rise of micro‑service architectures and cloud‑native technologies, monitoring systems have become increasingly critical. Prometheus, an open‑source monitoring system and time‑series database, is prized for its powerful query language, multi‑dimensional data model, and easy integration, making it essential for both beginners and seasoned operations engineers.

Prometheus Overview

Prometheus is an open‑source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its 2012 launch, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus; it now enjoys a very active developer and user community. It is maintained as an independent open‑source project and joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016 as the second hosted project after Kubernetes.

Prometheus stores metrics as time‑series data, pairing each metric value with a timestamp and optional key‑value pairs called labels .

Deploying Prometheus

Follow these steps to deploy Prometheus on a Kubernetes cluster using Helm charts:

Download the Prometheus chart package.

$ helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
"prometheus-community" has been added to your repositories

$ helm pull prometheus-community/prometheus --version 25.25.0

Upload the chart to an internal Harbor registry.

$ sudo helm registry login core.jiaxzeng.com --username admin
Password:
Login Succeeded

$ helm push prometheus-25.25.0.tgz oci://core.jiaxzeng.com/plugins
Pushed: core.jiaxzeng.com/plugins/prometheus:25.25.0
Digest: sha256:12441f0fb9fa902f7442a3d21aefc19a92c974738b8a05209df4025840b7e143

Pull the chart on the internal host.

$ sudo helm registry login core.jiaxzeng.com --username admin
Password:
Login Succeeded

$ sudo helm pull oci://core.jiaxzeng.com/plugins/prometheus --version 25.25.0 --untar --untardir /etc/kubernetes/addons/
Pulled: core.jiaxzeng.com/plugins/prometheus:25.25.0
Digest: sha256:12441f0fb9fa902f7442a3d21aefc19a92c974738b8a05209df4025840b7e143

Create a values file and install the chart.

$ cat <<'EOF' | sudo tee /etc/kubernetes/addons/prometheus-values.yaml > /dev/null
server:
  fullnameOverride: prometheus
  image:
    repository: core.jiaxzeng.com/library/monitor/prometheus
  prefixURL: "/prometheus"
  baseURL: "/prometheus"
  retention: "7d"
  ingress:
    enabled: true
    ingressClassName: nginx
    annotations:
      cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: ca-cluster-issuer
    hosts:
    - ops.jiaxzeng.com
    path: /prometheus
    pathType: Prefix
    tls:
    - secretName: prometheus-tls
      hosts:
      - ops.jiaxzeng.com

configmapReload:
  prometheus:
    image:
      repository: core.jiaxzeng.com/library/monitor/prometheus-config-reloader

alertmanager:
  enabled: false
kube-state-metrics:
  enabled: false
prometheus-node-exporter:
  enabled: false
prometheus-pushgateway:
  enabled: false
EOF

$ helm install -n kube-system prometheus -f /etc/kubernetes/addons/prometheus-values.yaml /etc/kubernetes/addons/prometheus

Validating Prometheus

Check that the Prometheus pods are running correctly:

$ kubectl -n kube-system get pod -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=prometheus
NAME                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
prometheus-7c8db6dd99-j4wjg   2/2   Running   0   4m19s

Then verify the UI in a browser (e.g.,

http://ops.jiaxzeng.com

or the internal cluster DNS).

Conclusion

By following this article you should now have a complete Prometheus monitoring system deployed, enabling you to maintain system health, detect issues promptly, and safeguard business continuity.