---
title: Monitoring and Alerting
description: Prometheus lets you view metrics from your different Rancher and Kubernetes objects. Learn about the scope of monitoring and how to enable cluster monitoring
---

<head>
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://ranchermanager.docs.rancher.com/integrations-in-rancher/monitoring-and-alerting"/>
</head>

The `rancher-monitoring` application can quickly deploy leading open-source monitoring and alerting solutions onto your cluster.

Introduced in Rancher v2.5, the application is powered by [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/), [Grafana](https://grafana.com/grafana/),  [Alertmanager](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/latest/alertmanager/), the [Prometheus Operator](https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator), and the [Prometheus adapter.](https://github.com/DirectXMan12/k8s-prometheus-adapter) 

For information on V1 monitoring and alerting, available in Rancher v2.2 up to v2.4, please see the Rancher v2.0—v2.4 docs on [cluster monitoring](https://github.com/rancher/rancher-docs/tree/main/archived_docs/en/version-2.0-2.4/explanations/integrations-in-rancher/cluster-monitoring/cluster-monitoring.md), [alerting](https://github.com/rancher/rancher-docs/tree/main/archived_docs/en/version-2.0-2.4/explanations/integrations-in-rancher/cluster-alerts/cluster-alerts.md), [notifiers](https://github.com/rancher/rancher-docs/tree/main/archived_docs/en/version-2.0-2.4/explanations/integrations-in-rancher/notifiers.md) and other [tools](https://github.com/rancher/rancher-docs/tree/main/archived_docs/en/version-2.0-2.4/reference-guides/rancher-project-tools/rancher-project-tools.md).

Using the `rancher-monitoring` application, you can quickly deploy leading open-source monitoring and alerting solutions onto your cluster.

## Features

Prometheus lets you view metrics from your Rancher and Kubernetes objects. Using timestamps, Prometheus lets you query and view these metrics in easy-to-read graphs and visuals, either through the Rancher UI or Grafana, which is an analytics viewing platform deployed along with Prometheus.

By viewing data that Prometheus scrapes from your cluster control plane, nodes, and deployments, you can stay on top of everything happening in your cluster. You can then use these analytics to better run your organization: stop system emergencies before they start, develop maintenance strategies, or restore crashed servers.

The monitoring application:

- Monitors the state and processes of your cluster nodes, Kubernetes components, and software deployments.
- Defines alerts based on metrics collected via Prometheus.
- Creates custom Grafana dashboards.
- Configures alert-based notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. using Prometheus Alertmanager.
- Defines precomputed, frequently needed or computationally expensive expressions as new time series based on metrics collected via Prometheus.
- Exposes collected metrics from Prometheus to the Kubernetes Custom Metrics API via Prometheus Adapter for use in HPA.

See [How Monitoring Works](how-monitoring-works.md) for an explanation of how the monitoring components work together.

## Default Components and Deployments

### Built-in Dashboards

By default, the monitoring application deploys Grafana dashboards (curated by the [kube-prometheus](https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus) project) onto a cluster.

It also deploys an Alertmanager UI and a Prometheus UI. For more information about these tools, see [Built-in Dashboards.](built-in-dashboards.md)
### Default Metrics Exporters

By default, Rancher Monitoring deploys exporters (such as [node-exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter) and [kube-state-metrics](https://github.com/kubernetes/kube-state-metrics)).

These default exporters automatically scrape metrics for CPU and memory from all components of your Kubernetes cluster, including your workloads.

### Default Alerts

The monitoring application deploys some alerts by default. To see the default alerts, go to the [Alertmanager UI](built-in-dashboards.md#alertmanager-ui) and click **Expand all groups.**

### Components Exposed in the Rancher UI

For a list of monitoring components exposed in the Rancher UI, along with common use cases for editing them, see [this section.](how-monitoring-works.md#components-exposed-in-the-rancher-ui)

## Role-based Access Control

For more information on configuring access to monitoring, see [this page.](rbac-for-monitoring.md)

:::note

Rancher and Project read permissions don't necessarily apply to monitoring resources. See [monitoring-ui-view](rbac-for-monitoring.md#additional-monitoring-clusterroles) for more details.

:::

## Guides

- [Enable monitoring](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/enable-monitoring.md)
- [Uninstall monitoring](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/uninstall-monitoring.md)
- [Monitoring workloads](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/set-up-monitoring-for-workloads.md)
- [Customizing Grafana dashboards](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/customize-grafana-dashboard.md)
- [Persistent Grafana dashboards](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/create-persistent-grafana-dashboard.md)
- [Debugging high memory usage](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/debug-high-memory-usage.md)

## Configuration

### Configuring Monitoring Resources in Rancher

The configuration reference assumes familiarity with how monitoring components work together. For more information, see [How Monitoring Works.](how-monitoring-works.md)

- [ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor](../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/servicemonitors-and-podmonitors.md)
- [Receiver](../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/receivers.md)
- [Route](../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/routes.md)
- [PrometheusRule](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration-guides/advanced-configuration/prometheusrules.md)
- [Prometheus](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration-guides/advanced-configuration/prometheus.md)
- [Alertmanager](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration-guides/advanced-configuration/alertmanager.md)

### Configuring Helm Chart Options

For more information on `rancher-monitoring` chart options, including options to set resource limits and requests, see [Helm Chart Options](../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/helm-chart-options.md).

## Windows Cluster Support

To be able to fully deploy Monitoring V2 for Windows, all of your Windows hosts must have a minimum [wins](https://github.com/rancher/wins) version of v0.1.0.

For more details on how to upgrade wins on existing Windows hosts, see [Windows cluster support for Monitoring V2.](windows-support.md).

## Known Issues

There is a [known issue](https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/28787#issuecomment-693611821) that K3s clusters require more than the allotted default memory. If you enable monitoring on a K3s cluster, set `prometheus.prometheusSpec.resources.memory.limit` to 2500 Mi and `prometheus.prometheusSpec.resources.memory.request` to 1750 Mi.

See [Debugging High Memory Usage](../../how-to-guides/advanced-user-guides/monitoring-alerting-guides/debug-high-memory-usage.md) for advice and recommendations.
