When it comes to running production-grade Kubernetes clusters, monitoring and alerting are considered essential components of an enterprise Kubernetes observability stack. 

In this hands-on lab, you'll learn how to set up and use the following essential monitoring applications:

• Kubernetes Dashboard
• Prometheus
• Grafana

You'll learn how to integrate these monitoring applications together into an effective and cohesive monitoring solution.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:

• Deploy and instrument a sample Python Flask web-based API into Kubernetes, instrumented to provide metrics which will be collected by Prometheus and displayed within Grafana
• Install and configure the Kubernetes Dashboard using Helm
• Install and configure Prometheus into Kubernetes using Helm
• Setup Prometheus for service discovery
• Install and configure Grafana into Kubernetes using Helm
• Import a pre-built dashboard for real-time visualisations

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Kubernetes practitioners
• DevOps Engineers
• SREs

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Basic Linux command line administration
• Basic Kubernetes and Container-based concepts

Lab Environment

This Lab will start with the following AWS resources provisioned automatically for you:

• 2 x EC2 instances - each assigned a public IP address:
  • ide.cloudacademy.platform.instance - provides a web-based IDE with integrated terminal
  • k8s.cloudacademy.platform.instance - provides a fully functional Kubernetes cluster

To achieve the Lab end state, you will be walked through the process of:

• Using your local workstation browser to remotely connect to the ide.cloudacademy.platform.instance
• Using the web-based IDE and integrated terminal, you'll complete the remainder of the stated Lab Objectives (above)