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Prometheus Stack

User-facing documentation for the prometheus-stack Helm chart in ovesorg/deployment-charts.

The chart is a vendored copy of the upstream prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack chart (currently pinned to 66.3.1, app version v0.78.2). Installing it deploys an end-to-end Kubernetes monitoring solution: Prometheus Operator, Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, kube-state-metrics, node-exporter, and the matching CRDs, ServiceMonitors and PrometheusRules.

Start here

  • Overview — what the chart solves and a one-page mental model.
  • Architecture — the moving parts and how they reconcile.
  • Components — what each subchart and template group is responsible for.
  • Installation — prerequisites and the recommended install command.
  • Agent · Start Here — a task-oriented entry point for agents and automations working in this repo.

Key concepts

Concept Where it lives
What gets deployed by helm install Overview » What you get
Operator + CRDs + materialized workloads Architecture
Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, exporters Components
values.yaml map and most-edited keys Configuration
Reaching the UIs (port-forward, Ingress, auth) Accessing services
Adding alerts via PrometheusRule Customization » Alerts and Rules
Adding dashboards via ConfigMap Customization » Dashboards
Adding scrape targets via ServiceMonitor / PodMonitor Customization » Scrape Targets
Day-2 health, cardinality, storage Operations » Day 2 Tasks
Upgrading the chart and CRDs Operations » Upgrading
Diagnosing common failures Operations » Troubleshooting
Terminology used across this site Reference » Terminology
External standards and upstream docs Reference » External References
Top-level values.yaml keys with OVES defaults Reference » Values Reference

Versions

Component Version
Chart kube-prometheus-stack 66.3.1
Prometheus Operator (appVersion) v0.78.2
kube-state-metrics subchart 5.27.*
prometheus-node-exporter subchart 4.42.*
grafana subchart 8.6.*
prometheus-windows-exporter subchart 0.7.*

Source of truth: deployment-charts/prometheus-stack/Chart.yaml.

Deploy with Helm, not ArgoCD UI/CLI

The in-repo prometheus-stack/README.md warns explicitly that ArgoCD UI or CLI deployment fails with a too many characters error because the bundled CRDs are large. Use plain helm install / helm upgrade. For GitOps, render with helm template and commit the manifests, or use a deployment tool that handles large CRDs.

Contributing

  1. Edit the Markdown sources under docs/.
  2. Record progressive architecture decisions in docs/adr/.
  3. Keep stable lookup material (terminology, external refs, values reference) under docs/reference/.
  4. Preview locally with mkdocs serve.

Small notes: progressive architecture decisions are tracked in Architecture Decision Records; stable lookup material lives under Reference.