How to Monitor Amazon EKS Using Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)

Source: Dev.to | Jan 08, 2026 (UTC)

Monitoring Amazon EKS with Prometheus and Grafana (Without Helm)
Monitoring is an important part of DevOps and DevSecOps. In this post, I’ll share a simple way to monitor an Amazon EKS cluster using Prometheus and Grafana without using Helm.

This guide is based on my hands-on learning while working with Kubernetes.

Why Monitoring Is Important

• Monitoring helps us:
• Check cluster health
• Monitor node and pod resource usage
• Find issues early
• Improve system stability and security

Tools Used

• Amazon EKS
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• kube-state-metrics
• node-exporter Helm is not used in this setup.

Simple Architecture

• Prometheus collects metrics from the EKS cluster
• Node Exporter collects node metrics
• kube-state-metrics provides Kubernetes object data
• Grafana displays metrics in dashboards

Step 1: Create Monitoring Namespace
kubectl create namespace monitoring

Step 2: Deploy kube-state-metrics
This component gives details about:

• Pods
• Namespaces
• Nodes
• Deployments After deployment, verify: kubectl get pods -n monitoring

Step 3: Deploy Node Exporter
Node Exporter runs on each worker node and collects:

• CPU
• Memory
• Disk metrics

Check status:
kubectl get pods -n monitoring -o wide

Step 4: Configure Prometheus

• Update Prometheus to scrape:
• Kubernetes nodes
• Pods
• kube-state-metrics

• kubelet metrics
  Add labels:

• cluster

• node

• namespace

• pod

These labels help filtering in Grafana.

Step 5: Connect Grafana to Prometheus

• Open Grafana
• Add Prometheus as a data source
• Save and test

Step 6: Import Dashboards

• Import Kubernetes dashboards to view:
• Cluster metrics
• Node usage
• Pod usage

You can filter by:

• Cluster
• Node
• Namespace
• Pod

What You Can Monitor:

• Cluster health
• Node CPU and memory
• Pod resource usage
• Pod restarts

What I Learned:

• Monitoring is essential for Kubernetes
• Prometheus and Grafana work well without Helm
• Labels are very useful for filtering metrics
• Good monitoring supports DevSecOps practices

Conclusion:
This is a simple and effective way to monitor Amazon EKS without Helm.
It’s a great starting point for anyone learning Kubernetes monitoring.
Thanks for reading!