- apps/monitoring/prometheus-grafana.yaml: ArgoCD Application (chart 68.4.4) - manifests/monitoring/values.yaml: lightweight values, Grafana ingress, 6h retention - docs/06-monitoring.md: Exercise 06 bonus participant guide
138 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
138 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
# Exercise 06 (Bonus) — Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana
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**Time**: ~60 min
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**Goal**: Deploy a full observability stack via ArgoCD and explore cluster + application metrics in Grafana.
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---
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## What you'll learn
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- How to deploy a complex multi-component stack (kube-prometheus-stack) purely via GitOps
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- How Prometheus scrapes metrics from Kubernetes and applications
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- How to navigate Grafana dashboards for cluster and pod-level metrics
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---
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## Prerequisites
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Exercises 01–03 complete. Ingress-Nginx is running and nip.io URLs are reachable from your laptop.
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**Note**: This exercise adds ~700 MB of additional memory usage. It works on an 8 GB VM but may be slow. If the VM feels sluggish, reduce `replicas` or skip Prometheus `storageSpec`.
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---
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## Steps
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### 1. Enable the monitoring Application
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The ArgoCD Application manifest for the monitoring stack is already in `apps/monitoring/`.
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The root App-of-Apps watches this directory, so the application should already appear
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in ArgoCD as **prometheus-grafana**.
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Check its sync status:
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```bash
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kubectl get application prometheus-grafana -n argocd
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```
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The initial sync takes 5–8 minutes — the kube-prometheus-stack chart is large and
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installs many CRDs.
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---
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### 2. Watch the stack come up
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```bash
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kubectl get pods -n monitoring -w
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# You'll see prometheus, grafana, kube-state-metrics, node-exporter pods appear
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```
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Once all pods are Running:
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```bash
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kubectl get ingress -n monitoring
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# NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS
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# grafana nginx grafana.192.168.56.200.nip.io 192.168.56.200
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```
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---
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### 3. Open Grafana
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From your laptop: **http://grafana.192.168.56.200.nip.io**
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Login: `admin` / `workshop123`
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---
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### 4. Explore dashboards
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kube-prometheus-stack ships with pre-built dashboards. In the Grafana sidebar:
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**Dashboards → Browse**
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Useful dashboards for this workshop:
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| Dashboard | What to look at |
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|-----------|----------------|
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| **Kubernetes / Compute Resources / Namespace (Pods)** | CPU + memory per pod in `podinfo` namespace |
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| **Kubernetes / Compute Resources / Node (Pods)** | Node-level resource view |
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| **Node Exporter / Full** | VM-level CPU, memory, disk, network |
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---
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### 5. Generate some load on podinfo
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In a new terminal, run a simple load loop:
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```bash
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# Inside the VM
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while true; do curl -s http://podinfo.192.168.56.200.nip.io > /dev/null; sleep 0.2; done
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```
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Switch back to Grafana → **Kubernetes / Compute Resources / Namespace (Pods)** →
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set namespace to `podinfo`. You should see CPU usage climb for the podinfo pod.
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---
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### 6. Explore the GitOps aspect
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Every configuration change to the monitoring stack goes through Git.
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Try changing the Grafana admin password:
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```bash
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vim manifests/monitoring/values.yaml
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# Change: adminPassword: workshop123
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# To: adminPassword: supersecret
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git add manifests/monitoring/values.yaml
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git commit -m "chore(monitoring): update grafana admin password"
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git push
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```
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Watch ArgoCD sync the Helm release, then try logging into Grafana with the new password.
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---
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## Expected outcome
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- Grafana accessible at **http://grafana.192.168.56.200.nip.io**
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- Prometheus scraping cluster metrics
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- Pre-built Kubernetes dashboards visible and populated
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---
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## Troubleshooting
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| Symptom | Fix |
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|---------|-----|
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| Pods in Pending state | VM may be low on memory; `kubectl describe pod` to confirm |
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| Grafana 502 from Nginx | Grafana pod not ready yet; wait and retry |
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| No data in dashboards | Prometheus needs ~2 min to scrape first metrics; wait and refresh |
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| CRD conflict on sync | First sync installs CRDs; second sync applies resources — retry |
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---
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## Going further (at home)
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- Add a podinfo `ServiceMonitor` so Prometheus scrapes podinfo's `/metrics` endpoint
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- Create a custom Grafana dashboard for podinfo request rate and error rate
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- Alert on high memory usage with Alertmanager (enable it in `values.yaml`)
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