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dinesh kumar
dinesh kumar

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How to Monitor Amazon EKS Using Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)

#kubernetes #eks #aws #devops

Monitoring Amazon EKS with Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)
Monitoring is an important part of DevOps and DevSecOps. In this post, I’ll share a simple way to monitor an Amazon EKS cluster using Prometheus and Grafana without using Helm.

This guide is based on my hands-on learning while working with Kubernetes.

Why Monitoring Is Important

  • Monitoring helps us:
  • Check cluster health
  • Monitor node and pod resource usage
  • Find issues early
  • Improve system stability and security

Tools Used

  • Amazon EKS
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • kube-state-metrics
  • node-exporter Helm is not used in this setup.

Simple Architecture

  • Prometheus collects metrics from the EKS cluster
  • Node Exporter collects node metrics
  • kube-state-metrics provides Kubernetes object data
  • Grafana displays metrics in dashboards

Step 1: Create Monitoring Namespace
kubectl create namespace monitoring

Step 2: Deploy kube-state-metrics
This component gives details about:

  • Pods
  • Namespaces
  • Nodes
  • Deployments After deployment, verify: kubectl get pods -n monitoring

Step 3: Deploy Node Exporter
Node Exporter runs on each worker node and collects:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Disk metrics

Check status:
kubectl get pods -n monitoring -o wide

Step 4: Configure Prometheus

  • Update Prometheus to scrape:
  • Kubernetes nodes
  • Pods
  • kube-state-metrics

  • kubelet metrics
    Add labels:

  • cluster

  • node

  • namespace

  • pod

These labels help filtering in Grafana.

Step 5: Connect Grafana to Prometheus

  • Open Grafana
  • Add Prometheus as a data source
  • Save and test

Step 6: Import Dashboards

  • Import Kubernetes dashboards to view:
  • Cluster metrics
  • Node usage
  • Pod usage

You can filter by:

  • Cluster
  • Node
  • Namespace
  • Pod

What You Can Monitor:

  • Cluster health
  • Node CPU and memory
  • Pod resource usage
  • Pod restarts

What I Learned:

  • Monitoring is essential for Kubernetes
  • Prometheus and Grafana work well without Helm
  • Labels are very useful for filtering metrics
  • Good monitoring supports DevSecOps practices

Conclusion:
This is a simple and effective way to monitor Amazon EKS without Helm.
It’s a great starting point for anyone learning Kubernetes monitoring.
Thanks for reading!

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