Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana Using Helm – Complete Tutorial 2026

Learn Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana in this complete hands-on tutorial using Helm! In this step-by-step Kubernetes monitoring demo, you'll deploy the kube-prometheus-stack on a kubeadm Kubernetes cluster, monitor nodes, pods, CPU, memory, and cluster health metrics, explore Prometheus targets, run PromQL queries, and visualize Kubernetes metrics using Grafana dashboards. Whether you're a DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes Administrator, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Cloud Engineer, or System Administrator, this practical Kubernetes observability tutorial will help you understand real-world monitoring and troubleshooting workflows. 🔥 In This Video: ✔️ Understand Kubernetes Monitoring Fundamentals ✔️ Deploy Prometheus & Grafana Using Helm ✔️ Install kube-prometheus-stack ✔️ Verify Monitoring Components ✔️ Access Prometheus Dashboard ✔️ Explore Prometheus Targets ✔️ Learn Basic PromQL Queries ✔️ Monitor CPU & Memory Usage ✔️ Access Grafana Dashboards ✔️ Monitor Kubernetes Nodes & Pods ✔️ Verify Node Exporter DaemonSet ✔️ Kubernetes Observability Best Practices 📊 Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus & Helm 0:00 - 🎯 Intro 0:40 - 🔍 Why Monitoring Matters in Production 1:25 - 📈 Metrics, Logs, and Traces Explained 2:09 - 🧠 What is Prometheus? 3:10 - 📦 Why Use Helm for Monitoring? 4:03 - 🏗️ Monitoring Architecture & Lab Workflow 5:33 - 💻 Lab Environment Specifications 6:13 - 🧪 Step 1: Cluster Health Verification 7:04 - 📥 Step 2: Adding Prometheus Helm Repositories 7:59 - 🌐 Step 3: Setting up the Monitoring Namespace 8:43 - 🚀 Step 4: Installing the kube-prometheus-stack 10:35 - 🔍 Step 5: Verifying Monitoring Deployments & Pods 11:46 - 📡 Step 6: Mapping Monitoring Cluster Services 12:12 - 🔗 Step 7: Port-Forwarding the Prometheus API 13:16 - 👁️ Step 8: Auditing Target Scrape Health 14:30 - 📑 Step 9: Introduction to PromQL Syntax 15:24 - 🧮 Step 10: Writing Node CPU Utilization Queries 15:56 - 💾 Step 11: Analyzing Container Memory Allocation 17:21 - 🚦 Step 12: Querying Pod Phase and Operational States 18:43 - 🔑 Step 13: Retrieving Graphana Admin Credentials 19:37 - 🎨 Step 14: Accessing the Graphana Dashboard UI 21:15 - 📈 Step 15: Visualizing Node and Pod Infrastructure Metrics 21:45 - 👥 Step 16: Auditing Node Exporter DaemonSets 22:41 - 🧹 Step 17: Optional Stack Cleanup & Deletion 24:14 - 🏁 Final Summary & Next Steps 📌 Watch the Full Kubeadm Labs Playlist: If you want to continue learning and building real multi-node Kubernetes clusters, check out our full playlist: [   • Kubernetes Real-World Labs (kubeadm)  ] 💻 Commands Used In This Video: kubectl get nodes kubectl get pods -A helm version helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.i... helm repo update kubectl create namespace monitoring helm install monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack -n monitoring --set alertmanager.enabled=false --timeout 15m helm list -n monitoring kubectl get pods -n monitoring kubectl get svc -n monitoring kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 svc/monitoring-kube-prometheus-prometheus 9091:9090 -n monitoring kubectl get nodes -o wide rate(node_cpu_seconds_total[5m]) 100 - (avg by(instance)(rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100) container_memory_usage_bytes (node_memory_MemTotal_bytes - node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes) / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes * 100 kube_pod_status_phase kube_pod_status_phase{phase="Running"} sum by(namespace, phase) (kube_pod_status_phase) kubectl get secret monitoring-grafana -n monitoring -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 -d kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 svc/monitoring-grafana 3000:80 -n monitoring kubectl get daemonsets -n monitoring helm uninstall monitoring -n monitoring kubectl delete namespace monitoring 🔥 Subscribe for more Kubernetes, Linux, DevOps, Docker, Terraform, Jenkins, Cloud Computing, and System Administration tutorials! #Kubernetes #Prometheus #Grafana #Helm #DevOps