%% date:: [[2023-04-25]], [[2023-04-28]] parent:: %% # [[Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring]] [site](https://grafana.com/solutions/kubernetes/) [[Grafana Labs|Grafana]] [[Kubernetes]] [[Monitoring]] is a pre-installed app on the [[SaaS]] platform [[Grafana Cloud]] that presents a simple and convenient package for tracking applications on Kubernetes clusters. This package includes: - Preconfigured manifests for [[Grafana Agent]] and [[kube-state-metrics]]. - Pre-built [[Grafana]] dashboards specific to Kubernetes - [[Prometheus]] [[Recording rules]] for commonly used queries - Alerting rules using [[Grafana Alerting]] for common signs of trouble regarding clusters and resources - An [[Allowlist]] of [[Metrics]] to show only the most important metrics - An eventhandler integration that sends [[Kubernetes Events]] to [[Grafana Loki|Loki]] Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring is an *opinionated* solution that employs [[Kubernetes Best Practices]] to simplify the setup of an [[Observability Stacks]] specifically to monitor [[Kubernetes]] clusters. It was built on top of the existing Kubernetes integration, and the full solution was released in July 2022. GKM is only available on [[Grafana Cloud]], but it's available on the free tier. Currently, integrations with [[Grafana Machine Learning]] are only available on paid tiers, but they're planning to roll out a new pricing model that will bring ML to free tiers too. ## Integrations - [[Grafana Machine Learning]] can predict resource usage at the node and pod levels - Planned integration with [[Grafana Incident]] %% - Planned integration with [[OpenCost]] for cost monitoring of Kubernetes clusters, to be released in Grafana 10. %% ## When you don't need GKM - When you're already sending [[kube-state-metrics]] to [[Prometheus]] (although this doesn't include some nice-to-haves that are preconfigured, such as pod logs, [[Kubernetes Events]], and resource management that rely on [[Grafana Agent]]) [^graf] ## Limitations - Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring does not yet include [[Traces]] via [[Grafana Tempo|Tempo]], which would need to be set up separately. - GKM is only available in [[Grafana Cloud]], although it's present in all tiers including the free one. ## Configuration methods With Kubernetes Monitoring, you can choose whether to use [[Grafana Agent]] or [[Grafana Agent Operator]] for setup. Grafana Agent forwards [[Telemetry]] to [[Grafana]] deployments (Grafana [[Open-source|OSS]], [[Grafana Cloud]], or [[Grafana Enterprise]]). Grafana Agent Operator is an [[Respect Levels of Abstraction|abstraction]] layer over Grafana Agent, making it a bit more [[Kubernetes]]-friendly and -native. *Rule of thumb:* Select Grafana Agent Operator unless you're not using Kubernetes. [^graf]: Grafana Labs. About Kubernetes Monitoring | Grafana Cloud documentation. Retrieved on April 25th, 2023 from https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/kubernetes-monitoring/about-k8s-monitoring/