How to Monitor Amazon EKS Using Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)

Monitoring Amazon EKS with Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)

Monitoring is an important part of DevOps and DevSecOps. In this post, I’ll share a simple way to monitor an Amazon EKS cluster using Prometheus and Grafana without using Helm.

This guide is based on my hands-on learning while working with Kubernetes.

Why Monitoring Is Important

• Monitoring helps us:


• Check cluster health


• Monitor node and pod resource usage


• Find issues early


• Improve system stability and security

Tools Used

• Amazon EKS


• Prometheus


• Grafana


• kube-state-metrics


• node-exporter
  Helm is not used in this setup.

Simple Architecture

• Prometheus collects metrics from the EKS cluster


• Node Exporter collects node metrics


• kube-state-metrics provides Kubernetes object data


• Grafana displays metrics in dashboards

Step 1: Create Monitoring Namespace

kubectl create namespace monitoring

Step 2: Deploy kube-state-metrics

This component gives details about:

• Pods


• Namespaces


• Nodes


• Deployments
  After deployment, verify:
  kubectl get pods -n monitoring

Step 3: Deploy Node Exporter

Node Exporter runs on each worker node and collects:

• CPU


• Memory


• Disk metrics

Check status:

kubectl get pods -n monitoring -o wide

Step 4: Configure Prometheus

• Update Prometheus to scrape:


• Kubernetes nodes


• Pods


• kube-state-metrics



• kubelet metrics
  
  Add labels:




• cluster




• node




• namespace




• pod

These labels help filtering in Grafana.

Step 5: Connect Grafana to Prometheus

• Open Grafana


• Add Prometheus as a data source


• Save and test

Step 6: Import Dashboards

• Import Kubernetes dashboards to view:


• Cluster metrics


• Node usage


• Pod usage

You can filter by:

• Cluster


• Node


• Namespace


• Pod

What You Can Monitor:

• Cluster health


• Node CPU and memory


• Pod resource usage


• Pod restarts

What I Learned:

• Monitoring is essential for Kubernetes


• Prometheus and Grafana work well without Helm


• Labels are very useful for filtering metrics


• Good monitoring supports DevSecOps practices

Conclusion:

This is a simple and effective way to monitor Amazon EKS without Helm.

It’s a great starting point for anyone learning Kubernetes monitoring.

Thanks for reading!