Benefits of using Prometheus and Grafana over Azure Monitor for Monitoring AKS Clusters
Dinu Raj D, July 2024
When it comes to monitoring AKS clusters, both Prometheus and Grafana can be used hand in hand to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution. The Azure platform has its own monitoring tool called “Azure monitor” which has a managed service for Prometheus for providing a fully managed Prometheus environment for collecting and storing metrics from the AKS clusters, in this article we are comparing and highlighting some of the benefits of using an entirely separate Prometheus and Grafana environment for monitoring the AKS cluster.
Following are some key features and best practices for monitoring AKS clusters with Azure Monitor:
Monitoring AKS Clusters using Azure monitor
Now let’s go through some benefits of using Prometheus and Grafana for the AKS monitoring.
One key advantage of using Prometheus is its ability to scrape metrics directly from the AKS cluster, whereas the Grafana plugin for Azure Monitor is limited to Azure Monitor. This allows Prometheus to provide more granular and detailed metrics about the cluster, which can be useful for troubleshooting and optimization.
On the other hand, Grafana provides a more user-friendly interface for visualizing and exploring the metrics collected by Prometheus. Grafana’s dashboards can be used to create customized views of the cluster’s performance, which can be helpful for identifying trends and anomalies.
In terms of implementation, Prometheus can be used to scrape metrics from the AKS cluster and then send them to a Prometheus-compatible data store, such as a Timescale DB instance. Grafana can then be used to create dashboards that visualize the metrics collected by Prometheus. Some of the features and best practices of Prometheus and Grafana are as follows
Now let’s check what are the features and benefits of choosing the Prometheus and Grafana over the Azure monitor for monitoring AKS clusters in the Azure environment.
Grafana offers various types of visualizations, including:
PromQL is used for querying data from Prometheus. Can be useful while creating dashboards or panels in Grafana
Grafana’s Prometheus Query Editor
Grafana provides a query editor for the Prometheus data source, which allows users to create queries in PromQL. The query editor is available in two modes: Code mode and Builder mode.
Software Costs: Prometheus and Grafana are open source, so there are no software costs associated with its implementation.
As an endnote to this topic, I should also point out the downside of the Prometheus and Grafana implementations. There are two major costs in the environment: the server and the management. There are, however, some strategies that can be used to mitigate this.
Cost-Effective Strategies:
To reduce the cost of implementation and management, consider the following strategies:
Using Prometheus and Grafana, we can gain valuable insights into the utilization of your infrastructure resources (e.g. CPU, memory, storage etc). Through improved monitoring and management, we will be able to ensure that only optimum resources are allocated to the application and hence reduce the cost.