What You'll Get

Plural uses Prometheus for a few main purposes:

• Displaying saturation data for common compute controllers within Kubernetes, like deployments and statefulsets
• Displaying cluster-level aggregate metrics for CPU, memory, pod saturation, etc.
• Extracting network metrics for service mesh observability; in particular, Istio and Cilium both ship their standard network metrics to Prometheus. We can use them to provide a holistic network graph and also use that information to inform Plural AI.

Once configured, if you go to a compute-related resource and click on the Metrics tab, you'll see something like:

And cluster saturation views will look like:

Deploy out of our Service Catalog

Plural ships by default with a full Service catalog to easily deploy solutions across your stack, among them a robust, scale-out setup of Prometheus using VictoriaMetrics. This solves several key problems with mainline Prometheus:

• Horizontal scaling - Prometheus scales only vertically, which is a poor fit for monitoring large sets of Kubernetes clusters that emit a very large volume of metrics, and increases operational burden. VictoriaMetrics supports a horizontally scalable cluster mode, which solves this entirely
• Inefficient agent mode - Prometheus wasn't built for a remote-write model, and its agent mode still effectively requires a local Prometheus store on-cluster. vmagent is a much better implementation and also adds support for other protocols like statsd. Remote write is necessary for multi-cluster observability since you likely cannot ingress into all clusters to perform metrics scrapes.
• Better Kubernetes operator implementation - the mainline Prometheus operator has several longstanding issues, in particular not supporting volume resizing as discussed here