Malcolm Holmes provides a detailed guide on setting up a monitoring system using Tanka and the prometheus-ksonnet library within a Kubernetes environment. The process involves leveraging Jsonnet for enhanced collaboration and ease of configuration, allowing users to install Prometheus and Grafana along with the kubernetes-mixin library, which offers best practice dashboards and alerts for Kubernetes monitoring. The guide assumes a pre-existing Kubernetes cluster and provides step-by-step instructions for installing necessary tools like Tanka and Jsonnet Bundler, downloading the prometheus-ksonnet library, and configuring it within the Kubernetes context. Users can then apply these configurations to deploy Grafana, Prometheus, and NodeExporter, and access the services locally. Holmes also references additional resources for further exploration and mentions an upcoming blog post on integrating the setup with Grafana Cloud.