creating a local monitoring environment with helm

Introduction

In this post, that is actually documentation for myself, I'll guide you thru the deployment of a monitoring environment in your local machine, this can be used for study and prototype. The project will use prometheus to monitor and grafana to plot graphs.

Getting your machine ready

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS as my OS

First you'll need to install a tool to run Kubernetes locally (kind, minikube, k3s or other that you like; Personally I use kind)

The steps are the following

$wget https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind/releases/download/v0.8.1/kind-linux-amd64
$chmod +x kind-linux-amd64
$mv kind-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/kind
$kind version

and then install Helm

sudo snap install helm --classic

for other ways of installing helm please refer to Helm Documentation

Kind

Now that we have our tools installed we need to create a kubernetes cluster

kind create cluster --name

If you don't put the flag --name the cluster name will be "kind"

Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes

To Add the prometheus charts repo use the command:

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

We'll install two helm charts

kube-prometheus-stack

As per github This chart contains a collection of Kubernetes manifests, Grafana dashboards, and Prometheus rules combined with documentation and scripts to provide easy to operate end-to-end Kubernetes cluster monitoring with Prometheus using the Prometheus Operator.

helm install prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack --generate-name

pushgateway

Pushgateway is a tool that pushes metrics that cannot be scraped

helm install prometheus-community/prometheus-pushgateway --generate-name

Testing and Tweaking

Run kubectl get services to see the services running and some information about them. A detail when deploying prometheus localy is to change the type of the following services kube-prometheus-stack-1611-operator kube-prometheus-stack-1611575778-grafana from ClusterIP to NodePort (if you are deploying it in a cloud environment you shall change to LoadBalancer). More information about Kubernetes services can be found here

To edit the services use the following command

kubectl edit svc your-service-goes-here

this command will open a vim type editor and allow you to edit information about the service

Now all you have to do is expose the ports using the port-forward command, the following example allows me to access alert-manager via browser

kubectl port-forward svc/alertmanager-operated 9093

The syntax is kubectl port-forward TYPE/NAME PORT.

And that's all for today 🤓

References

Kube Prometheus Stack
Helm Documentation
Kind Quick Start
Pushgateway
Port Forward
Kubectl cheat sheet