In the previous post of this series I described the steps to create a new monitoring namespace in an existing Sitecore AKS cluster and to install two important tools for metrics collection and data visualization: Prometheus and Grafana. In this blog post I will describe how to enhance and configure Grafana data sources to collect metrics from internal and external AKS cluster resources. I will also describe and share a comprehensive collection of Grafana dashboards to visualize the collected metrics.

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When working with a containerized distributed platform like Sitecore, it is important to be able to monitor metrics of all critical resources in its AKS cluster. The Container Insights monitoring feature available in AKS provides valuable data for the platform and the containerized application, but lacks deeper metric collection at workload level. For this reason, a couple of years ago Microsoft launched a native capability to integrate Azure Monitor with Prometheus, a popular open-source metric monitoring solution.

Prometheus collects metrics as time series: a series of timestamped values belonging to the same metric and indexed in time order. The metrics collection occurs via a pull model over HTTP from collection targets identified dynamically through service discovery or via static configuration. Metrics from a target can be exposed in Prometheus metrics data format implementing a custom HTTP endpoint using a client library (there are many available in different languages, including .NET / C#) or using a third-party exporter that collects, converts and exposes the metrics over HTTP.

Prometheus metrics data can be queried in the Prometheus Web UI using its own PromQL query language. Or, for a much more intuitive and robust experience, they can be visualized in Grafana, an open source data visualization solution, that allows to query, visualize and alert on data collected from multiple sources, including the Prometheus API.

Both Prometheus and Grafana are two important must-have additions to the monitoring stack of an AKS cluster. In the next sections, I will describe how to install and configure Prometheus and Grafana in an existing AKS cluster, how to export host metrics from a Windows node in the cluster and how to access them in the Azure Log Analytics workspace of the cluster and in Grafana.

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