Deploying Prometheus and Grafana using Helm in EKS

Introduction

Prometheus is a popular open-source monitoring solution that provides metrics storage, querying, and alerting capabilities. Grafana, on the other hand, is a widely used visualization and analytics platform for monitoring data.

In this blog, we will discuss how to deploy Prometheus and Grafana using Helm in an EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster.

Prerequisites

Before we get started, you will need the following:

1. An AWS account
2. An EKS cluster
3. A running Kubernetes cluster
4. The Helm package manager installed on your system

Step 1: Install Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies the installation and management of Kubernetes applications. To install Helm, follow the instructions provided in the official Helm documentation.

Step 2: Add the Prometheus and Grafana repositories to Helm

To add the Prometheus and Grafana repositories to Helm, use the following commands:

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts

Step 3: Create a new namespace

The following command will create a new namespace named monitoring:

$ kubectl create namespace monitoring

Step 4: Install Prometheus

To install Prometheus, use the following command:

$ helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack --namespace monitoring

This command will install the kube-prometheus-stack chart from the prometheus-community repository and create the necessary Kubernetes resources.

Step 5: Accessing the Prometheus GUI

To access the Prometheus GUI, we will use a port-forward command to connect to the Prometheus pod running in your EKS cluster. The following command will create a port-forward connection to the Prometheus pod:

$ kubectl port-forward prometheus-kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-0 9090

Step 6: Install Grafana

To install Grafana, use the following command:

$ helm install grafana grafana/grafana --namespace monitoring

This command will install the Grafana chart from the Grafana repository and create the necessary Kubernetes resources.

Step 7: Accessing Grafana

kubectl port-forward svc/grafana 3000:80

This command will forward the Grafana service port to your local machine's port 3000. Now, you can access Grafana by opening a web browser and navigating to http://localhost:3000.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have discussed how to deploy Prometheus and Grafana using Helm in an EKS cluster. We have also covered the steps required to configure Prometheus as a data source in Grafana. With these tools in place, you can monitor your Kubernetes cluster and applications easily and efficiently.