Tools for Monitoring Resources

In Kubernetes, application monitoring does not depend on a single monitoring solution. On new clusters, you can use resource metrics or pipelines to collect monitoring statistics.

metrics-server discovers all nodes on the cluster and queries each node’s kubelet for CPU and memory usage. The kubelet acts as a bridge between the Kubernetes master and the nodes, managing the pods and containers running on a machine. The kubelet translates each pod into its constituent containers and fetches individual container usage statistics from the container runtime through the container runtime interface. The kubelet fetches this information from the integrated cAdvisor for the legacy Docker integration. It then exposes the aggregated pod resource usage statistics through the metrics-server Resource Metrics API. This API is served at on the kubelet’s authenticated and read-only ports.

Full metrics pipeline

Prometheus, a CNCF project, can natively monitor Kubernetes, nodes, and Prometheus itself. Full metrics pipeline projects that are not part of the CNCF are outside the scope of Kubernetes documentation.