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:

Database Cross-Region Replication Patterns#

Cross-region replication exists because regions fail. AWS us-east-1 has had multiple multi-hour outages. If your database runs in a single region, a regional failure takes your application down entirely. Cross-region replication gives you a copy of the data somewhere else so you can recover.

The fundamental problem is physics. Light through fiber between US East and US West takes about 30ms one way. Every replication strategy is a different answer to the question: do you wait for the remote region to confirm it has the data before telling the client the write succeeded?

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.