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Overview

The prometheus-stack chart in ovesorg/deployment-charts is a vendored copy of the upstream kube-prometheus-stack Helm chart. Installing it gives you a complete, opinionated Kubernetes monitoring solution in one shot.

What problem does it solve?

Running Prometheus on Kubernetes "by hand" means stitching together at least the following:

  • Prometheus server (with the right scrape configuration for the kubelet, API server, etcd, scheduler, controller-manager, kube-proxy, CoreDNS)
  • Alertmanager (with routing, receivers, silences)
  • Grafana (datasource wiring, dashboards, sidecars)
  • kube-state-metrics and node-exporter (and a way to scrape them)
  • Alerting rules and recording rules
  • TLS, RBAC, ServiceAccounts, NetworkPolicies, PodDisruptionBudgets

The chart wraps all of this. You get a single helm install that deploys the Prometheus Operator plus a set of Custom Resources (Prometheus, Alertmanager, ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, PrometheusRule, ...). The Operator then materializes those CRs into actual StatefulSets and Deployments and keeps them reconciled.

What is not in the chart

The chart focuses on cluster-level monitoring with Prometheus. It is not:

  • A logging stack (use Loki / Elastic / Splunk separately)
  • A tracing stack (use Tempo / Jaeger / OpenTelemetry separately)
  • A long-term metric store (the chart can integrate with Thanos / Cortex / Mimir, but does not deploy them)
  • A SIEM or APM product

High-level mental model

flowchart LR
    subgraph User
      H[helm install] --> CRDs
      H --> CRs[Custom Resources<br/>Prometheus / Alertmanager / ...]
    end

    subgraph Operator
      OP[Prometheus Operator<br/>Deployment]
    end

    subgraph Workloads
      P[Prometheus<br/>StatefulSet]
      A[Alertmanager<br/>StatefulSet]
      G[Grafana<br/>Deployment]
      KSM[kube-state-metrics<br/>Deployment]
      NE[node-exporter<br/>DaemonSet]
    end

    CRDs --> OP
    CRs --> OP
    OP -->|reconciles| P
    OP -->|reconciles| A

    P -->|scrapes| KSM
    P -->|scrapes| NE
    P -->|scrapes| KubeAPI[Kubernetes API server]
    P -->|scrapes| Kubelet[Kubelet / cAdvisor]
    P -->|sends alerts| A
    G -->|queries| P

In practice you only ever interact with:

  1. The chart's values.yaml (during install / upgrade).
  2. Kubernetes Custom Resources of kinds ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, PrometheusRule, and occasionally AlertmanagerConfig.
  3. The Grafana, Prometheus and Alertmanager UIs.

The Operator handles everything else.

What this guide covers

  • Architecture — what gets deployed and how the pieces talk to each other.
  • Components — what each subchart and template group is responsible for.
  • Installation — prerequisites and the recommended install command.
  • Configuration — the most-edited parts of values.yaml.
  • Accessing services — reaching the Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana UIs.
  • Customization — adding your own alerts, dashboards, and scrape targets.
  • Operations — upgrades, backups, and troubleshooting.
  • Reference — terminology, external references, and the values-reference map.