Prometheus and Grafana on Minikube: Production-Like Monitoring Without the Cost

Calendar February 22, 2026
Kubernetes
Intermediate
Monitoring-Setup, Helm-Configuration, Metrics-Collection
Prometheus, Grafana, Monitoring, Minikube, Kube-Prometheus-Stack, Servicemonitor
Helm, Kubectl, Prometheus, Grafana

Why Monitor a POC Cluster#

Monitoring on minikube serves two purposes. First, it catches resource problems early – your app might work in tests but OOM-kill under load, and you will not know without metrics. Second, it validates that your monitoring configuration works before you deploy it to production. If your ServiceMonitors, dashboards, and alert rules work on minikube, they will work on EKS or GKE.

The Right Chart: kube-prometheus-stack#

There are multiple Prometheus-related Helm charts. Use the right one:

Prometheus and Grafana Monitoring Stack

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Monitoring-Setup, Promql, Alerting-Configuration
Prometheus, Grafana, Monitoring, Alerting, Observability, Kubernetes
Prometheus, Grafana, Helm, Kubectl

Prometheus Architecture#

Prometheus pulls metrics from targets at regular intervals (scraping). Each target exposes an HTTP endpoint (typically /metrics) that returns metrics in a text format. Prometheus stores the scraped data in a local time-series database and evaluates alerting rules against it. Grafana connects to Prometheus as a data source and renders dashboards.

Scrape Configuration#

The core of Prometheus configuration is the scrape config. Each scrape_config block defines a set of targets and how to scrape them.