Monitoring & Observability

The observability stack provides metrics, dashboards, and centralized logging for the entire cluster.

Stack components

Component	Role	Helm chart
kube-prometheus-stack	Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager + exporters	prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack
Loki	Centralized log storage	grafana/loki
Promtail	Log collector (DaemonSet)	grafana/promtail

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Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   monitoring namespace                    │
│                                                          │
│  ┌──────────────┐    ┌───────────┐    ┌──────────────┐  │
│  │  Prometheus  │◄───│ Exporters │    │    Loki      │  │
│  │  (metrics)   │    │ (node,    │    │  (log store) │  │
│  └──────┬───────┘    │  cadvisor)│    └──────▲───────┘  │
│         │            └───────────┘           │          │
│  ┌──────▼───────┐                    ┌───────┴──────┐   │
│  │   Grafana    │◄───────────────────│   Promtail   │   │
│  │  (dashboards)│                    │  (DaemonSet) │   │
│  └──────────────┘                    └──────────────┘   │
│                                                          │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
         ▲ HTTPS via Traefik IngressRoute + cert-manager

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Prerequisites

Before deploying monitoring:

1. Base stack deployed (make deploy)
2. Grafana admin secret created:

make deploy-grafana-secret

This creates a grafana-admin-secret in the monitoring namespace with:

• username: admin
• password: <GRAFANA_PASSWORD from .env>

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Deploy

make deploy-monitoring

This runs scripts/deploy-monitoring.sh which:

1. Adds prometheus-community and grafana Helm repos
2. Installs kube-prometheus-stack (Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager)
3. Installs Loki (single-binary, filesystem storage)
4. Installs Promtail (log collector DaemonSet on every node)
5. Applies the Grafana IngressRoute + TLS Certificate
6. Imports the Grafana logs dashboard

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kube-prometheus-stack

The kube-prometheus-stack Helm chart installs:

• Prometheus — metrics collection and storage
• Grafana — visualization dashboards
• Alertmanager — alert routing and silencing
• kube-state-metrics — Kubernetes object metrics
• node-exporter — host-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk)
• Prometheus Operator — manages ServiceMonitor and PrometheusRule CRDs

Grafana access

URL:      https://<GRAFANA_DOMAIN>
Username: admin
Password: <GRAFANA_PASSWORD>

Prometheus access (port-forward)

kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-operated -n monitoring 9090:9090
# Open: http://localhost:9090

Alertmanager access (port-forward)

kubectl port-forward svc/alertmanager-operated -n monitoring 9093:9093
# Open: http://localhost:9093

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Loki

Loki stores logs indexed by labels (no full-text indexing). It is queried from Grafana using LogQL.

Configuration (kubernetes/monitoring/loki-values.yaml): deployed in single-binary mode with filesystem storage — suitable for single-node homelab use.

Query logs in Grafana

1. Go to Explore → select Loki datasource
2. Use a LogQL query:

{namespace="apps"}
{namespace="ingress", job="traefik"} |= "error"
{app="my-app"} | json | level="error"

Loki service endpoint (in-cluster)

http://loki.monitoring.svc.cluster.local:3100

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Promtail

Promtail is deployed as a DaemonSet — one pod per node. It:

1. Reads container logs from /var/log/pods/
2. Attaches Kubernetes labels (namespace, pod, container, app)
3. Pushes log streams to Loki

Configuration (kubernetes/monitoring/promtail-values.yaml): uses the default pipeline stages to extract structured labels from Kubernetes metadata.

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Grafana dashboards

The following dashboards are available after deploy:

Dashboard	Source	What it shows
Kubernetes cluster overview	kube-prometheus built-in	Node CPU/memory, pod counts
Node exporter	kube-prometheus built-in	Host CPU, memory, disk, network
Traefik	ServiceMonitor auto-discovery	Request rates, latencies, errors
Logs — Errors	grafana-logs-dashboard.yaml	Error-focused log explorer

Import additional dashboards

Grafana has a large community dashboard library. Import by ID from Dashboards → Import:

ID	Name
315	Kubernetes cluster monitoring
1860	Node exporter full
13713	Loki log summary
17501	Traefik

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Traefik metrics integration

Traefik exposes Prometheus metrics on port 9100. The serviceMonitor in traefik-values.yaml creates a ServiceMonitor resource that tells Prometheus Operator to scrape Traefik automatically:

metrics:
  prometheus:
    serviceMonitor:
      enabled: true
      namespace: ingress
      jobLabel: traefik
      interval: 30s

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Upgrade

helm upgrade kube-prometheus-stack prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
  --version <NEW_VERSION> \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --values kubernetes/monitoring/kube-prometheus-values.yaml \
  --reuse-values

Update the version in .env (KUBE_PROMETHEUS_VERSION) and re-run make deploy-monitoring.

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References

• kube-prometheus-stack chart
• Loki documentation
• Promtail documentation
• LogQL query language
• Grafana documentation