Which open source tool is best known for Kubernetes monitoring?

Prometheus is widely recognized as the best open source tool for Kubernetes monitoring due to its multi-dimensional data model and powerful querying language. It is specifically designed for reliability and scalability, making it an excellent choice for dynamic, containerized environments like Kubernetes.

Prometheus operates by scraping metrics from configured endpoints at specified intervals, allowing it to collect real-time monitoring data from Kubernetes components and applications. Its integration with Kubernetes is seamless, enabling automatic service discovery for various resources such as pods and nodes, which is crucial for monitoring in cloud-native environments.

Additionally, Prometheus provides built-in alerting capabilities, which help users respond quickly to performance issues. Its ability to store time-series data efficiently allows users to visualize trends over time and perform in-depth analysis on application performance.

While other tools like the ELK stack, Grafana, and Graphite serve valuable roles in the monitoring ecosystem—such as log management and data visualization—Prometheus stands out as the primary tool optimized for collecting and querying metrics from Kubernetes clusters.