Prometheus & Grafana
Prometheus collects metrics as time series, Grafana visualizes them in dashboards – together they form the standard stack for Kubernetes monitoring.
What Are Prometheus and Grafana?
Prometheus and Grafana are two open-source tools that together form the de facto standard for monitoring and observability in Kubernetes environments. Prometheus collects and stores metrics as time series, while Grafana visualizes this data in interactive dashboards and alerting systems.
Prometheus in Detail
Prometheus is a time-series database with a pull-based model: it scrapes metrics from endpoints at regular intervals. The query language PromQL enables complex analyses and aggregations. The Alertmanager processes alerts and forwards them to Slack, PagerDuty, or email.
Core Components
- Prometheus Server: Scraping, storage, and querying of metrics
- Exporters: Convert metrics from external systems into Prometheus format
- Alertmanager: Deduplication, grouping, and routing of alerts
- Pushgateway: For short-lived batch jobs that cannot be scraped
Grafana in Detail
Grafana is the visualization layer: it connects to Prometheus and other data sources and displays metrics in configurable dashboards. Grafana supports dozens of data sources – from Prometheus to Elasticsearch to CloudWatch – enabling unified dashboards across different systems.
Monitoring Strategies
The four golden signals (per Google SRE) form the foundation for effective monitoring: latency, traffic, error rate, and saturation. Prometheus captures these signals, Grafana makes them visible, and Alertmanager notifies you when thresholds are exceeded.
Prometheus in Kubernetes
The kube-prometheus-stack (Helm chart) installs Prometheus, Grafana, and preconfigured dashboards for Kubernetes clusters with a single command. ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor CRDs enable declarative monitoring setup: teams define which services should be scraped.
Best Practices
- Use labels consistently for filtering and aggregation
- Limit metric cardinality (no user IDs as labels)
- Configure retention policies and remote write for long-term storage
- Create SLO-based dashboards and alerts
- Use recording rules for frequently queried complex queries
Why devRocks?
We implement Prometheus and Grafana as a complete monitoring solution for your Kubernetes infrastructure. From metric architecture to custom exporters to SLO dashboards and alerting strategies, we ensure full transparency across your systems.
Frequently asked questions about Prometheus & Grafana
Yes, with federation, remote write (Thanos or Cortex), and optimized metric cardinality, Prometheus scales even for enterprise environments with millions of time series.
Grafana OSS is free and open source. Grafana Cloud offers a free tier for small teams. Enterprise features like RBAC, reporting, and SAML are available in the paid version.
Yes, Prometheus works independently of Kubernetes. Exporters exist for Linux servers, databases, network equipment, and virtually any system. The Kubernetes focus comes from native integration.
Storage requirements depend on the number of time series and retention. As a rule of thumb: about 1–2 bytes per sample. For most mid-market setups, 50–200 GB of local SSD storage is sufficient.
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Last updated: April 2026