Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes; Operator is used to manage stateful distributed applications on Kubernetes. This article mainly describes how to use Helm and Operator to quickly deploy Prometheus on a Minikube cluster and use Grafana to view monitoring data. For Minikube installation, see Building a Remote Kubernetes Development Environment; for Helm configuration, see The Package Manager for Kubernetes – Helm; for Operator, see Kubernetes Complex Stateful Application Management Framework – Operator.

Internet services often depend on tens of thousands of hosts, and those hosts are deployed all over the world, on top of a tangled mess of user environments. To keep a service stable and reliable, you need to monitor it. The goals of monitoring can be considered from several angles: from the system dimension, understand CPU, memory, and disk usage; from the network monitoring dimension, understand upstream and downstream rates; from the service monitoring dimension, understand the health and availability of the application.