Control plane metrics with Prometheus - Amazon EKS
Viewing the raw metricsDeploying PrometheusStore your Prometheus metrics in Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
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Control plane metrics with Prometheus

The Kubernetes API server exposes a number of metrics that are useful for monitoring and analysis. These metrics are exposed internally through a metrics endpoint that refers to the /metrics HTTP API. Like other endpoints, this endpoint is exposed on the Amazon EKS control plane.

While this endpoint is useful if you are looking for a specific metric, you typically want to analyze these metrics over time. To do this, you can deploy Prometheus into your cluster. Prometheus is a monitoring and time series database that scrapes exposed endpoints and aggregates data, allowing you to filter, graph, and query the results. This topic explains how to deploy Prometheus and some of the ways that you can use it to view and analyze what your cluster is doing.

Viewing the raw metrics

To view the raw metrics output, use kubectl with the --raw flag. This command allows you to pass any HTTP path and returns the raw response.

kubectl get --raw /metrics

An example output is as follows.

[...]
# HELP rest_client_requests_total Number of HTTP requests, partitioned by status code, method, and host.
# TYPE rest_client_requests_total counter
rest_client_requests_total{code="200",host="127.0.0.1:21362",method="POST"} 4994
rest_client_requests_total{code="200",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="DELETE"} 1
rest_client_requests_total{code="200",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="GET"} 1.326086e+06
rest_client_requests_total{code="200",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="PUT"} 862173
rest_client_requests_total{code="404",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="GET"} 2
rest_client_requests_total{code="409",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="POST"} 3
rest_client_requests_total{code="409",host="127.0.0.1:443",method="PUT"} 8
# HELP ssh_tunnel_open_count Counter of ssh tunnel total open attempts
# TYPE ssh_tunnel_open_count counter
ssh_tunnel_open_count 0
# HELP ssh_tunnel_open_fail_count Counter of ssh tunnel failed open attempts
# TYPE ssh_tunnel_open_fail_count counter
ssh_tunnel_open_fail_count 0

This raw output returns verbatim what the API server exposes. These metrics are represented in a Prometheus format. This format allows the API server to expose different metrics broken down by line. Each line includes a metric name, tags, and a value.

metric_name{"tag"="value"[,...]} value

While this endpoint is useful if you are looking for a specific metric, you typically want to analyze these metrics over time. To do this, you can deploy Prometheus into your cluster.

Deploying Prometheus

This topic helps you deploy Prometheus into your cluster with Helm V3. If you already have Helm installed, you can check your version with the helm version command. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes clusters. For more information about Helm and how to install it, see Using Helm with Amazon EKS.

After you configure Helm for your Amazon EKS cluster, you can use it to deploy Prometheus with the following steps.

To deploy Prometheus using Helm

  1. Create a Prometheus namespace.

    kubectl create namespace prometheus

  2. Add the prometheus-community chart repository.

    helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts

  3. Deploy Prometheus.

    helm upgrade -i prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus \
    --namespace prometheus \
    --set alertmanager.persistentVolume.storageClass="gp2",server.persistentVolume.storageClass="gp2"
    Note

    If you get the error Error: failed to download "stable/prometheus" (hint: running `helm repo update` may help) when executing this command, run helm repo update prometheus-community, and then try running the Step 2 command again.

    If you get the error Error: rendered manifests contain a resource that already exists, run helm uninstall your-release-name -n namespace, then try running the Step 3 command again.

  4. Verify that all of the Pods in the prometheus namespace are in the READY state.

    kubectl get pods -n prometheus

    An example output is as follows.

    NAME                                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
prometheus-alertmanager-59b4c8c744-r7bgp         1/2     Running   0          48s
prometheus-kube-state-metrics-7cfd87cf99-jkz2f   1/1     Running   0          48s
prometheus-node-exporter-jcjqz                   1/1     Running   0          48s
prometheus-node-exporter-jxv2h                   1/1     Running   0          48s
prometheus-node-exporter-vbdks                   1/1     Running   0          48s
prometheus-pushgateway-76c444b68c-82tnw          1/1     Running   0          48s
prometheus-server-775957f748-mmht9               1/2     Running   0          48s

  5. Use kubectl to port forward the Prometheus console to your local machine.

    kubectl --namespace=prometheus port-forward deploy/prometheus-server 9090

  6. Point a web browser to http://localhost:9090 to view the Prometheus console.

  7. Choose a metric from the - insert metric at cursor menu, then choose Execute. Choose the Graph tab to show the metric over time. The following image shows container_memory_usage_bytes over time.

    Prometheus metrics

  8. From the top navigation bar, choose Status, then Targets.

    Prometheus console

    All of the Kubernetes endpoints that are connected to Prometheus using service discovery are displayed.

Store your Prometheus metrics in Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a Prometheus-compatible monitoring and alerting service that makes it easy to monitor containerized applications and infrastructure at scale. It is a fully-managed service that automatically scales the ingestion, storage, querying, and alerting of your metrics. It also integrates with Amazon security services to enable fast and secure access to your data. You can use the open-source PromQL query language to query your metrics and alert on them.

For more information, see Getting started with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus.