Monitoring Kubernetes — With Prometheus And Nagstamon
We all know that systems don’t always behave like they should. Bad things are happening and services become unreachable. Good that we engineers invented monitoring solutions for that.
If you are using Kubernetes, the chances are high that you are already using Prometheus as your monitoring tool. With its Alertmanager you are able to send notifications via email, Slack, SMS or whatever. The problem with all these notification channels is, that they might not get the attention, that they should because not only your monitoring is sending messages there, right?
There is another solution though:
Nagstamon
Let me quote the website:
Nagstamon is a status monitor for the desktop. It comes with these key features:
- connects to multiple monitoring servers
- resides in systray, as a floating statusbar or fullscreen at the desktop
- showing a brief summary of critical, warning, unknown, unreachable and down hosts and services
- pops up a detailed status overview when being touched by the mouse pointer
- connections to displayed hosts and services are easily established by context menu
- actions can be triggered via SSH, RDP, VNC or any self defined connection
- users can be notified by sound and flashing window
- hosts and services can be filtered by category and regular expressions
Those of you who are monitoring their IT infrastructure with classical monitoring tools like Nagios, Icinga, etc. may already have heard of this tool. If you don’t or are only using Prometheus you will most probably never have heard about it. In both cases, here are the good news:
Prometheus/Alertmanager Support In Nagstamon
Since 2020 Nagstamon has support for Prometheus/Alertmanager. Though it is still very basic, without the ability to silence alerts, it may already be useful to some of you.
Developing the integration was my first contribution to the open source community and a lot of fun.
Main Advantages
These are the main advantages of Nagstamon over other solutions:
- Client available for Windows, MacOS and Linux
- Can play a siren sound (anything else) that definitely pulls your attention when something is broken
- Have your Prometheus monitoring alerts side-by-side with those of your classical monitoring tools (Nagios, Icinga, Opsview, etc.)
- More than one Kubernetes cluster? Put them all into your Nagstamon: DEV, PROD and the others as well
- Open-Source software, if you need anything else or want to help developing, head over to Github and let’s go
Download
Get the current release of Nagstamon here: https://nagstamon.de
