Grafana and Prometheus Setup with Helmfile: A Guide to Monitoring in Production Environments
In this post, we will explore the setup and deployment of a robust and comprehensive monitoring solution for production environments running on an rke2 kubernetes cluster. In today’s landscape monitoring is very crucial for maintaining the reliability and performance of production systems. I want to go through an effective way of implementing monitoring tools using Helmfile to streamline the process. Here are the key components in our setup:
- Grafana Helm Chart: Is being used for visualizing and analyzing metrics from our Kubernetes cluster.
- Prometheus Helm Chart: Used for collecting Kubernetes metrics and providing the data to Grafana.
- AWS-EBS CSI Driver: To manage persistent storage efficiently within our Kubernetes environment.
Before we delve into our monitoring setup, let’s get a better understanding of helmfile. helmfile is a powerful tool, that helps you manage multiple Helm charts declaratively.
If you haven’t already, create a Helmfile — a YAML-based configuration file for managing Helm charts and releases. Helmfile simplifies Kubernetes deployments, providing a structured approach to defining environments, repositories, and releases. Once your Helmfile is set up, we’ll configure it to deploy Grafana, Prometheus, and the AWS EBS CSI Driver, empowering your Kubernetes cluster with a robust monitoring solution.
In our Helmfile, we start by defining environments to streamline the deployment process. Here, we have established a single environment, aptly named “dev”. Environments serve as logical groupings that allow us to manage our deployments more efficiently, accommodating variations between development, staging, and production setups. With the “dev” environment in place, we’re ready to proceed with configuring repositories and releases to bring our monitoring solution to life.
Prometheus
Prometheus is the monitoring tool that we will be integrating with Grafana, which will allow us to keep track of the health of our rke2 cluster. Prometheus will be gathering and storing metrics, enabling us to be responsiveness if the system is down or in need of maintenance. Prometheus will not only monitor our systems but can also interface with Grafana to manage alerts and incidents.
