---
title: Enable Monitoring
---
As an [administrator](../authentication-permissions-and-global-configuration/manage-role-based-access-control-rbac/global-permissions.md) or [cluster owner](../authentication-permissions-and-global-configuration/manage-role-based-access-control-rbac/cluster-and-project-roles.md#cluster-roles), you can configure Rancher to deploy Prometheus to monitor your Kubernetes cluster.
This page describes how to enable monitoring and alerting within a cluster using the new monitoring application.
You can enable monitoring with or without SSL.
## Requirements
- Make sure that you are allowing traffic on port 9796 for each of your nodes because Prometheus will scrape metrics from here.
- Make sure your cluster fulfills the resource requirements. The cluster should have at least 1950Mi memory available, 2700m CPU, and 50Gi storage. A breakdown of the resource limits and requests is [here.](../../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/helm-chart-options.md#configuring-resource-limits-and-requests)
- When installing monitoring on an RKE cluster using RancherOS or Flatcar Linux nodes, change the etcd node certificate directory to `/opt/rke/etc/kubernetes/ssl`.
- For clusters provisioned with the RKE CLI and the address is set to a hostname instead of an IP address, set `rkeEtcd.clients.useLocalhost` to `true` during the Values configuration step of the installation. The YAML snippet will look like the following:
```yaml
rkeEtcd:
clients:
useLocalhost: true
```
> **Note:** If you want to set up Alertmanager, Grafana or Ingress, it has to be done with the settings on the Helm chart deployment. It's problematic to create Ingress outside the deployment.
## Setting Resource Limits and Requests
The resource requests and limits can be configured when installing `rancher-monitoring`. To configure Prometheus resources from the Rancher UI, click **Apps & Marketplace > Monitoring** in the upper left corner.
For more information about the default limits, see [this page.](../../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/helm-chart-options.md#configuring-resource-limits-and-requests)
## Install the Monitoring Application
### Enable Monitoring for use without SSL
1. In the Rancher UI, go to the cluster where you want to install monitoring and click **Cluster Explorer.**
1. Click **Apps.**
1. Click the `rancher-monitoring` app.
1. Optional: Click **Chart Options** and configure alerting, Prometheus and Grafana. For help, refer to the [configuration reference.](../../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/helm-chart-options.md)
1. Scroll to the bottom of the Helm chart README and click **Install.**
**Result:** The monitoring app is deployed in the `cattle-monitoring-system` namespace.
### Enable Monitoring for use with SSL
1. Follow the steps on [this page](../../new-user-guides/kubernetes-resources-setup/secrets.md) to create a secret in order for SSL to be used for alerts.
- The secret should be created in the `cattle-monitoring-system` namespace. If it doesn't exist, create it first.
- Add the `ca`, `cert`, and `key` files to the secret.
1. In the Rancher UI, go to the cluster where you want to install monitoring and click **Cluster Explorer.**
1. Click **Apps.**
1. Click the `rancher-monitoring` app.
1. Click **Alerting**.
1. Click **Additional Secrets** and add the secrets created earlier.
**Result:** The monitoring app is deployed in the `cattle-monitoring-system` namespace.
When [creating a receiver,](../../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/receivers.md#creating-receivers-in-the-rancher-ui) SSL-enabled receivers such as email or webhook will have a **SSL** section with fields for **CA File Path**, **Cert File Path**, and **Key File Path**. Fill in these fields with the paths to each of `ca`, `cert`, and `key`. The path will be of the form `/etc/alertmanager/secrets/name-of-file-in-secret`.
For example, if you created a secret with these key-value pairs:
```yaml
ca.crt=`base64-content`
cert.pem=`base64-content`
key.pfx=`base64-content`
```
Then **Cert File Path** would be set to `/etc/alertmanager/secrets/cert.pem`.
1. In the Rancher UI, go to the cluster where you want to install monitoring and click **Cluster Explorer.**
1. Click **Apps.**
1. Click the `rancher-monitoring` app.
1. Optional: Click **Chart Options** and configure alerting, Prometheus and Grafana. For help, refer to the [configuration reference.](../../../reference-guides/monitoring-v2-configuration/helm-chart-options.md)
1. Scroll to the bottom of the Helm chart README and click **Install.**
**Result:** The monitoring app is deployed in the `cattle-monitoring-system` namespace.