⚠️ DEPRECATED

Further development has moved to prometheus-community/helm-charts. The chart has been renamed kube-prometheus-stack to more clearly reflect that it installs the kube-prometheus project stack, within which Prometheus Operator is only one component.

prometheus-operator

Installs prometheus-operator to create/configure/manage Prometheus clusters atop Kubernetes. This chart includes multiple components and is suitable for a variety of use-cases.

The default installation is intended to suit monitoring a kubernetes cluster the chart is deployed onto. It closely matches the kube-prometheus project.

• prometheus-operator
• prometheus
• alertmanager
• node-exporter
• kube-state-metrics
• grafana
• service monitors to scrape internal kubernetes components
  • kube-apiserver
  • kube-scheduler
  • kube-controller-manager
  • etcd
  • kube-dns/coredns
  • kube-proxy

With the installation, the chart also includes dashboards and alerts.

The same chart can be used to run multiple prometheus instances in the same cluster if required. To achieve this, the other components need to be disabled - it is necessary to run only one instance of prometheus-operator and a pair of alertmanager pods for an HA configuration.

TL;DR;

$ helm install stable/prometheus-operator

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a prometheus-operator deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager. The chart can be installed multiple times to create separate Prometheus instances managed by Prometheus Operator.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.10+ with Beta APIs
• Helm 2.12+ (If using Helm < 2.14, see below for CRD workaround)

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm install --name my-release stable/prometheus-operator

The command deploys prometheus-operator on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The configuration section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

The default installation includes Prometheus Operator, Alertmanager, Grafana, and configuration for scraping Kubernetes infrastructure.

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

CRDs created by this chart are not removed by default and should be manually cleaned up:

kubectl delete crd prometheuses.monitoring.coreos.com
kubectl delete crd prometheusrules.monitoring.coreos.com
kubectl delete crd servicemonitors.monitoring.coreos.com
kubectl delete crd podmonitors.monitoring.coreos.com
kubectl delete crd alertmanagers.monitoring.coreos.com
kubectl delete crd thanosrulers.monitoring.coreos.com

Work-Arounds for Known Issues

Running on private GKE clusters

When Google configure the control plane for private clusters, they automatically configure VPC peering between your Kubernetes cluster’s network and a separate Google managed project. In order to restrict what Google are able to access within your cluster, the firewall rules configured restrict access to your Kubernetes pods. This means that in order to use the webhook component with a GKE private cluster, you must configure an additional firewall rule to allow the GKE control plane access to your webhook pod.

You can read more information on how to add firewall rules for the GKE control plane nodes in the GKE docs

Alternatively, you can disable the hooks by setting prometheusOperator.admissionWebhooks.enabled=false.

Helm fails to create CRDs

You should upgrade to Helm 2.14 + in order to avoid this issue. However, if you are stuck with an earlier Helm release you should instead use the following approach: Due to a bug in helm, it is possible for the 5 CRDs that are created by this chart to fail to get fully deployed before Helm attempts to create resources that require them. This affects all versions of Helm with a potential fix pending. In order to work around this issue when installing the chart you will need to make sure all 5 CRDs exist in the cluster first and disable their previsioning by the chart:

1. Create CRDs

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_alertmanagers.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_podmonitors.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_prometheuses.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_prometheusrules.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_servicemonitors.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/release-0.38/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_thanosrulers.yaml

2. Wait for CRDs to be created, which should only take a few seconds

3. Install the chart, but disable the CRD provisioning by setting prometheusOperator.createCustomResource=false

$ helm install --name my-release stable/prometheus-operator --set prometheusOperator.createCustomResource=false

Upgrading an existing Release to a new major version

A major chart version change (like v1.2.3 -> v2.0.0) indicates that there is an incompatible breaking change needing manual actions.

Upgrading from 8.x.x to 9.x.x

Version 9 of the helm chart removes the existing additionalScrapeConfigsExternal in favour of additionalScrapeConfigsSecret. This change lets users specify the secret name and secret key to use for the additional scrape configuration of prometheus. This is useful for users that have prometheus-operator as a subchart and also have a template that creates the additional scrape configuration.

Upgrading from 7.x.x to 8.x.x

Due to new template functions being used in the rules in version 8.x.x of the chart, an upgrade to Prometheus Operator and Prometheus is necessary in order to support them. First, upgrade to the latest version of 7.x.x

helm upgrade <your-release-name> stable/prometheus-operator --version 7.4.0

Then upgrade to 8.x.x

helm upgrade <your-release-name> stable/prometheus-operator

Minimal recommended Prometheus version for this chart release is 2.12.x

Upgrading from 6.x.x to 7.x.x

Due to a change in grafana subchart, version 7.x.x now requires Helm >= 2.12.0.

Upgrading from 5.x.x to 6.x.x

Due to a change in deployment labels of kube-state-metrics, the upgrade requires helm upgrade --force in order to re-create the deployment. If this is not done an error will occur indicating that the deployment cannot be modified:

invalid: spec.selector: Invalid value: v1.LabelSelector{MatchLabels:map[string]string{"app.kubernetes.io/name":"kube-state-metrics"}, MatchExpressions:[]v1.LabelSelectorRequirement(nil)}: field is immutable

If this error has already been encountered, a helm history command can be used to determine which release has worked, then helm rollback to the release, then helm upgrade --force to this new one

prometheus.io/scrape

The prometheus operator does not support annotation-based discovery of services, using the serviceMonitor CRD in its place as it provides far more configuration options. For information on how to use servicemonitors, please see the documentation on the coreos/prometheus-operator documentation here: Running Exporters

By default, Prometheus discovers ServiceMonitors within its namespace, that are labeled with the same release tag as the prometheus-operator release. Sometimes, you may need to discover custom ServiceMonitors, for example used to scrape data from third-party applications. An easy way of doing this, without compromising the default ServiceMonitors discovery, is allowing Prometheus to discover all ServiceMonitors within its namespace, without applying label filtering. To do so, you can set prometheus.prometheusSpec.serviceMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues to false.

Configuration

The following tables list the configurable parameters of the prometheus-operator chart and their default values.

General

Prometheus Operator

Prometheus

Alertmanager

Grafana

This is not a full list of the possible values.

For a full list of configurable values please refer to the Grafana chart.

Exporters

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

$ helm install --name my-release stable/prometheus-operator --set prometheusOperator.enabled=true

Alternatively, one or more YAML files that specify the values for the above parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install --name my-release stable/prometheus-operator -f values1.yaml,values2.yaml

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

PrometheusRules Admission Webhooks

With Prometheus Operator version 0.30+, the core Prometheus Operator pod exposes an endpoint that will integrate with the validatingwebhookconfiguration Kubernetes feature to prevent malformed rules from being added to the cluster.

How the Chart Configures the Hooks

A validating and mutating webhook configuration requires the endpoint to which the request is sent to use TLS. It is possible to set up custom certificates to do this, but in most cases, a self-signed certificate is enough. The setup of this component requires some more complex orchestration when using helm. The steps are created to be idempotent and to allow turning the feature on and off without running into helm quirks.

1. A pre-install hook provisions a certificate into the same namespace using a format compatible with provisioning using end-user certificates. If the certificate already exists, the hook exits.
2. The prometheus operator pod is configured to use a TLS proxy container, which will load that certificate.
3. Validating and Mutating webhook configurations are created in the cluster, with their failure mode set to Ignore. This allows rules to be created by the same chart at the same time, even though the webhook has not yet been fully set up - it does not have the correct CA field set.
4. A post-install hook reads the CA from the secret created by step 1 and patches the Validating and Mutating webhook configurations. This process will allow a custom CA provisioned by some other process to also be patched into the webhook configurations. The chosen failure policy is also patched into the webhook configurations

Alternatives

It should be possible to use jetstack/cert-manager if a more complete solution is required, but it has not been tested.

Limitations

Because the operator can only run as a single pod, there is potential for this component failure to cause rule deployment failure. Because this risk is outweighed by the benefit of having validation, the feature is enabled by default.

Developing Prometheus Rules and Grafana Dashboards

This chart Grafana Dashboards and Prometheus Rules are just a copy from coreos/prometheus-operator and other sources, synced (with alterations) by scripts in hack folder. In order to introduce any changes you need to first add them to the original repo and then sync there by scripts.

Further Information

For more in-depth documentation of configuration options meanings, please see

• Prometheus Operator
• Prometheus
• Grafana

Migrating from coreos/prometheus-operator chart

The multiple charts have been combined into a single chart that installs prometheus operator, prometheus, alertmanager, grafana as well as the multitude of exporters necessary to monitor a cluster.

There is no simple and direct migration path between the charts as the changes are extensive and intended to make the chart easier to support.

The capabilities of the old chart are all available in the new chart, including the ability to run multiple prometheus instances on a single cluster - you will need to disable the parts of the chart you do not wish to deploy.

You can check out the tickets for this change here and here.

High-level overview of Changes

The chart has 3 dependencies, that can be seen in the chart's requirements file: https://github.com/helm/charts/blob/master/stable/prometheus-operator/requirements.yaml

Node-Exporter, Kube-State-Metrics

These components are loaded as dependencies into the chart. The source for both charts is found in the same repository. They are relatively simple components.

Grafana

The Grafana chart is more feature-rich than this chart - it contains a sidecar that is able to load data sources and dashboards from configmaps deployed into the same cluster. For more information check out the documentation for the chart

Coreos CRDs

The CRDs are provisioned using crd-install hooks, rather than relying on a separate chart installation. If you already have these CRDs provisioned and don't want to remove them, you can disable the CRD creation by these hooks by passing prometheusOperator.createCustomResource=false (not required if using Helm v3).

Kubelet Service

Because the kubelet service has a new name in the chart, make sure to clean up the old kubelet service in the kube-system namespace to prevent counting container metrics twice.

Persistent Volumes

If you would like to keep the data of the current persistent volumes, it should be possible to attach existing volumes to new PVCs and PVs that are created using the conventions in the new chart. For example, in order to use an existing Azure disk for a helm release called prometheus-migration the following resources can be created:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: pvc-prometheus-migration-prometheus-0
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  azureDisk:
    cachingMode: None
    diskName: pvc-prometheus-migration-prometheus-0
    diskURI: /subscriptions/f5125d82-2622-4c50-8d25-3f7ba3e9ac4b/resourceGroups/sample-migration-resource-group/providers/Microsoft.Compute/disks/pvc-prometheus-migration-prometheus-0
    fsType: ""
    kind: Managed
    readOnly: false
  capacity:
    storage: 1Gi
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Delete
  storageClassName: prometheus
  volumeMode: Filesystem

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  labels:
    app: prometheus
    prometheus: prometheus-migration-prometheus
  name: prometheus-prometheus-migration-prometheus-db-prometheus-prometheus-migration-prometheus-0
  namespace: monitoring
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  dataSource: null
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
  storageClassName: prometheus
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  volumeName: pvc-prometheus-migration-prometheus-0
status:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  capacity:
    storage: 1Gi

The PVC will take ownership of the PV and when you create a release using a persistent volume claim template it will use the existing PVCs as they match the naming convention used by the chart. For other cloud providers similar approaches can be used.

KubeProxy

The metrics bind address of kube-proxy is default to 127.0.0.1:10249 that prometheus instances cannot access to. You should expose metrics by changing metricsBindAddress field value to 0.0.0.0:10249 if you want to collect them.

Depending on the cluster, the relevant part config.conf will be in ConfigMap kube-system/kube-proxy or kube-system/kube-proxy-config. For example:

kubectl -n kube-system edit cm kube-proxy

apiVersion: v1
data:
  config.conf: |-
    apiVersion: kubeproxy.config.k8s.io/v1alpha1
    kind: KubeProxyConfiguration
    # ...
    # metricsBindAddress: 127.0.0.1:10249
    metricsBindAddress: 0.0.0.0:10249
    # ...
  kubeconfig.conf: |-
    # ...
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  labels:
    app: kube-proxy
  name: kube-proxy
  namespace: kube-system