Introducing Murre: A Lightweight K8s Metrics Monitoring Tool

The Kubernetes ecosystem includes a few complementary add-ons for aggregating and exposing monitoring data from your Kubernetes cluster, but one of these useful add-ons is the Metrics Server. However, its installation can introduce issues such as maintenance requirements and potential crashes. The author's company, groundcover, aimed to expose K8s node resources and usage metrics for their customers without installing a 3rd party tool like the Metrics Server. They found that the Kubelet, which runs on each node of a Kubernetes cluster, already exposes resource metrics through APIs. By querying these APIs, they can get the job done without deploying a Metrics Server, making it a lightweight and frictionless approach to Kubernetes application monitoring.