Monitoring

ARK exposes Prometheus metrics from the controller. This guide covers setting up Prometheus and Grafana to monitor your ARK installation.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster with ARK deployed
• Helm installed

Install Prometheus stack

Install the kube-prometheus-stack which includes Prometheus, Grafana, and the ServiceMonitor CRD:

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
 
helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
  --namespace monitoring --create-namespace \
  --set prometheus.prometheusSpec.serviceMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues=false

The serviceMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues=false setting allows Prometheus to discover ServiceMonitors in all namespaces.

Verify metrics collection

Check that the ARK ServiceMonitor exists:

kubectl get servicemonitor -n ark-system

Port-forward to Prometheus and check the targets:

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus 9090:9090

Open http://localhost:9090/targets  and verify ARK targets are being scraped.

Access Grafana

Port-forward to Grafana:

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus-grafana 3000:80

Open http://localhost:3000  and log in with:

• Username: admin
• Password: prom-operator

TLS configuration

ARK uses cert-manager to secure metrics endpoints with TLS. The ServiceMonitor is configured to verify certificates rather than skip verification (insecureSkipVerify: false).

Ensure cert-manager is installed (included by default with devspace dev):

kubectl get pods -n cert-manager

Available metrics

ARK exposes standard Kubernetes controller metrics including:

• Reconciliation counts and durations
• Work queue depth and latency
• Controller runtime metrics

Query these in Prometheus using the controller_runtime_* metric prefix.