Introduction to performance monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana

In this chapter, we will reuse the deployment of Prometheus and Grafana that we created in Chapter 18, Using a Service Mesh to Improve Observability and Management, in the Deploying Istio in a Kubernetes cluster section. Also in that chapter, we were briefly introduced to Prometheus, a popular open source database for collecting and storing time series data such as performance metrics. We learned about Grafana, an open source tool to visualize performance metrics. With the Grafana deployment comes a set of Istio-specific dashboards. Kiali can also render some performance-related graphs without the use of Grafana. In this chapter, we will get some hands-on experience with these tools.

The Istio configuration we deployed in Chapter 18 includes a configuration of Prometheus, which automatically collects metrics from Pods in Kubernetes. All we need to do is set up an endpoint in our microservice that produces metrics...