Now that Heapster is nearing end of life, using the in incubation Metrics Server allows the "core" resources of CPU and Memory, is there a non-deprecated way of accessing other resource metrics (disk and network usage, for example) WITHOUT resorting to Prometheus?
Thank you.
Prometheus is becoming standart de-facto for monitoring Kubernetes cluster.
When does it fit?
Prometheus works well for recording any purely numeric time series. It fits both machine-centric monitoring as well as monitoring of highly dynamic service-oriented architectures. In a world of microservices, its support for multi-dimensional data collection and querying is a particular strength.Prometheus is designed for reliability, to be the system you go to during an outage to allow you to quickly diagnose problems. Each Prometheus server is standalone, not depending on network storage or other remote services. You can rely on it when other parts of your infrastructure are broken, and you do not need to setup extensive infrastructure to use it.
When does it not fit?
Prometheus values reliability. You can always view what statistics are available about your system, even under failure conditions. If you need 100% accuracy, such as for per-request billing, Prometheus is not a good choice as the collected data will likely not be detailed and complete enough. In such a case you would be best off using some other system to collect and analyze the data for billing, and Prometheus for the rest of your monitoring.
You can use metrics-server for some basic monitoring. Looks like it is the default tool. It integrates with kubectl top.
You can install metrics-server using helm from stable as follows:
helm install stable/metrics-server
You can also install it by other means if you don't use helm. Here are some installation docs from Amazon EKS.