Adding Prometheus/Grafana to your Kubernetes Cluster

Let’s assume you’ve got a running Kubernetes cluster set up, with some services running and you’d like to monitor the state of the cluster/namespace or specific pods. Using Prometheus along with Grafana is a great solution.

To deploy, just follow these steps by executing the following commands (you’ll need helm installed).

  • helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
  • helm repo update
  • helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack –namespace monitoring –create-namespace

With the last command you should see something like the following

Response was
NAME: prometheus
LAST DEPLOYED: Sat Jul 26 12:03:34 2025
NAMESPACE: monitoring
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
kube-prometheus-stack has been installed. Check its status by running:

Now to check everything is working and to use Grafana Dashboards, simply use port forwarding, i.e.

kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-grafana 80:80 -n monitoring

Now you can access http://localhost:80 (or whatever port has been set up).

Default login credentials are username/password admin/prom-operator.

Azure Managed Prometheus

You can also use Azure’s managed Prometheus instance.

I’ve not tried setting this up via Azure, so the steps below are taken from another source (sorry I cannot recall where), feel free to try them

  • Enable Azure Monitor Managed Prometheus
  • Go to your AKS cluster in the Azure Portal.
  • Under Monitoring, enable Managed Prometheus.
  • Create Azure Managed Grafana
  • Use the Azure Portal or CLI to create a Grafana instance.
  • Link it to your Azure Monitor workspace.
  • Configure Grafana Data Source
  • In Grafana, add a Prometheus data source.
  • Use the Azure Monitor workspace query endpoint.
  • Assign Permissions
  • Ensure your Grafana instance or app registration has the Monitoring Data Reader role on the workspace.