Monitoring a Kubernetes environment demands a distinct strategy compared to traditional VM-based or unorchestrated container approaches, due to its dynamic nature and reliance on abstractions like Deployments and DaemonSets. Kubernetes offers extensive APIs for automation and cluster management, facilitating performance data collection that falls into categories like cluster state metrics, resource metrics, and work metrics from the Control Plane. Key components include worker nodes that run containerized workloads and Control Plane nodes that manage the cluster, with tools like Metrics Server and kube-state-metrics enhancing data aggregation and accessibility. Monitoring memory, CPU, and disk usage, alongside Kubernetes events, is crucial for understanding resource utilization and maintaining cluster performance. The Control Plane's various services, such as the API server and etcd data stores, also emit important metrics that help track cluster health, while keeping an eye on specific metrics like memory limits, CPU requests, and disk utilization can prevent resource allocation issues. Collecting Kubernetes events complements this by offering insights into pod lifecycle impacts, and Part 3 of the series promises to delve further into leveraging Kubernetes APIs for comprehensive metric collection.