Is it possible to get pod metrics from prometheus without RBAC? - kubernetes

Question

I have a Kubernetes namespace with limited privileges which excludes the creation of ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding.
I want to monitor the resource consumption and pod-related metrics on the namespace level.
E.g., pod health and status, new pod creation, pod restarts, etc.
Although I can create an application-level metrics endpoint for custom metrics by exposing /metrics and adding the annotation prometheus.io/scrape: 'true'.
But is there a way to get resource consumption and pod-related metrics on the namespace level without Cluster Role and ClusterRoleBinding?

Answer 1

It is possible to get namespace level entities from kube-state-metrics.
Pull the helm chart for kube-state-metrics:
https://bitnami.com/stack/kube-state-metrics/helm
Edit the values.yaml file and make the following changes:
rbac:
create: false
useClusterRole: false
collectors:
- configmaps
- cronjobs
- daemonsets
- deployments
- endpoints
- horizontalpodautoscalers
- ingresses
- jobs
- limitranges
- networkpolicies
- poddisruptionbudgets
- pods
- replicasets
- resourcequotas
- services
- statefulsets
namespace: <current-namespace>
In the prometheus ConfigMap, add a job with the following configurations:
- job_name: 'kube-state-metrics'
scrape_interval: 1s
scrape_timeout: 500ms
static_configs:
- targets: ['{{ .Values.kube_state_metrics.service.name }}:8080']
Create a role binding:
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
name: kube-state-metrics
namespace: <current-namespace>
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: view
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: kube-state-metrics
namespace: <current-namespace>