Monitoring Container Clusters with Prometheus

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In native cloud environments, classic monitoring tools reach their limits when monitoring transient objects such as containers. Prometheus closes this gap, which Kubernetes complements, thanks to its conceptual similarity, simple structure, and far-reaching automation.

Kubernetes [1] makes it much easier for admins to distribute container-based infrastructures. In principle, you no longer have to worry about where applications run or if sufficient resources are available. However, if you want to ensure the best performance, you usually cannot avoid monitoring the applications, the containers in which they run, and Kubernetes itself.

You can read how Prometheus works in a previous ADMIN article [2]; here, I shed light on the collaboration between Prometheus and Kubernetes. Because of its service discovery, Prometheus independently retrieves information about the container platform, the current container, services, and applications via the Kubernetes API. You do not have to change the configuration of Prometheus when pods launch or die or when new nodes appear in the cluster: Prometheus detects all of this.

Read more at ADMIN