Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana on EKS: Visualizing Metrics for Better Insights
Table of contents
In this article, we will guide you through setting up Prometheus and Grafana on Amazon EKS for monitoring and visualizing metrics from your Kubernetes cluster. Prometheus collects time-series data from various sources, including your applications and infrastructure, while Grafana provides powerful dashboards to visualize this data. We’ll walk through the process of deploying Prometheus for metrics scraping, configuring Grafana for interactive dashboards, and integrating both to gain valuable insights into your cluster’s performance, resource usage, and application health. By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped to monitor your EKS-based workloads effectively.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It collects and stores time-series data, such as metrics from applications and infrastructure, using a pull model. Prometheus supports multi-dimensional data collection with flexible queries, making it ideal for monitoring Kubernetes, microservices, and cloud-native environments.
PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) is the powerful query language used by Prometheus to retrieve and manipulate time-series data. It allows users to select, aggregate, and filter metrics over time, enabling complex analyses and alerting based on real-time data.
To get prometheus Dashboard
Istioctl dashboard prometheus
The query rate(istio_requests_total{destination_service="productpage.default.svc.cluster.local"}[5m]) calculates the per-second rate of HTTP requests to the productpage service in the default namespace over the last 5 minutes.
sample promql query:
rate(istio_requests_total{destination_service="productpage.default.svc.cluster.local"}[5m])
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source data visualization and analytics platform used to create interactive and customizable dashboards. It integrates with various data sources, including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and others, to visualize time-series metrics and logs in real time. Grafana allows users to create graphs, charts, and alerts, helping teams monitor infrastructure, applications, and services. It provides powerful query capabilities and intuitive UI to easily explore data, detect issues, and track performance.
to get grafana dashboard run:
istioctl grafana dashboard
Data source
In Grafana, a data source is a connection to an external system where metrics, logs, or traces are stored, such as Prometheus, Elasticsearch, or InfluxDB. Configuring a data source allows Grafana to fetch and visualize the data in custom dashboards and panels.
Loki and prometheus data sources
Dashboards
Dashboards in Grafana are interactive, customizable collections of visualizations (such as graphs, tables, and gauges) that represent and analyze data from connected data sources. Dashboards allow users to monitor and visualize real-time metrics, logs, and performance data, helping teams quickly identify trends, anomalies, and issues in their systems or applications. They can be shared, customized with various panels, and configured with different query filters and time ranges for detailed insights.
Performance dashboard
Conclusion:
In this blog, we've explored how to set up Prometheus and Grafana for effective monitoring in a Kubernetes-based environment like Amazon EKS. By integrating Prometheus to collect and store metrics and Grafana to visualize and analyze them, we have empowered ourselves with real-time insights into our applications and infrastructure. With these powerful tools, you can proactively monitor your systems, detect anomalies, and ensure optimal performance. As you continue to scale your applications, Prometheus and Grafana provide the foundation for a robust observability strategy, enhancing your ability to maintain healthy, high-performing systems.