Grafana Labs addresses a common inquiry about whether to run Prometheus in a containerized environment versus a VM-based one, suggesting that if you are monitoring services in Kubernetes, utilizing Prometheus as a container within Kubernetes is preferable due to the need for direct connectivity for metric scraping. Prometheus benefits from being close to monitored services, and in scenarios with multiple private networks, multiple Prometheus servers may be necessary. While Prometheus itself is versatile and can run effectively in either environment, certain components like node_exporter may require running directly on the host due to their need for kernel interfaces. To ensure reliability even if the Kubernetes cluster encounters issues, implementing a "Dead Man's Switch" alert can notify an external service to confirm that Prometheus and the alerting pipeline are functioning correctly.