I'm building on Kubernetes and need reliable infrastructure monitoring

For reliable infrastructure monitoring on Kubernetes, aim for a stack that covers metrics, logs, traces, and alerting. A proven starting point is:

Core components

• Metrics: Prometheus + Alertmanager
• Visualization: Grafana
• Logs: Loki + Promtail or Fluent Bit
• Traces: Tempo or Jaeger
• Kubernetes health/exporters: kube-state-metrics, node-exporter, cAdvisor (usually via kubelet), and app-specific exporters

What to monitor

Cluster-level

• Node CPU, memory, disk, network
• Pod restarts, OOMKills, CrashLoopBackOff
• Namespace resource usage
• Node pressure conditions
• Cluster autoscaler activity
• API server latency/errors
• etcd health and latency
• Scheduler and controller-manager health

Workload-level

• Request rate, error rate, latency (RED)
• Saturation: CPU/memory limits, queue depth, connection pools
• Deployment availability and rollout status
• HPA scaling behavior

Storage and networking

• PVC usage and health
• Persistent volume latency/errors
• Ingress/Service latency, packet drops, DNS errors
• CNI health

Best practices

• Use Prometheus Operator (via Helm or kube-prometheus-stack) to manage rules and scrape configs.
• Set resource requests/limits for monitoring components so they don’t become unstable.
• Separate retention/storage for metrics and logs; use durable storage for Prometheus if you need history.
• Create SLO-based alerts, not just raw threshold alerts.
• Alert routing: integrate Alertmanager with PagerDuty, Slack, email, etc.
• Label consistently across services (app, team, env, service).
• Dashboards as code to version-control Grafana dashboards and alerts.
• Test alerts using failure injection or synthetic checks.

A practical deployment option

If you want something reliable and standard:

• Install kube-prometheus-stack
• Add Loki for logs
• Add Tempo if you need tracing
• Use Grafana to unify dashboards
• Export app metrics using /metrics endpoints

Reliability tips

• Run monitoring components with:
  • anti-affinity / pod topology spread
  • multiple replicas where supported
  • persistent volumes for Prometheus
  • PodDisruptionBudgets
  • resource requests/limits
• Don’t rely only on node-level monitoring; add synthetic checks and application-level SLI monitoring
• Back up Grafana dashboards, Prometheus rules, and Alertmanager config

If you want, I can give you:

1. a production-ready monitoring architecture,
2. a Helm-based installation plan, or
3. a sample set of Prometheus alert rules for Kubernetes.