Kubernetes Monitoring Setup (Alloy + Loki + Mimir + Grafana )

This repo shows how I’d deploy a monitoring stack on Kubernetes using Helm and simple YAML manifests.

Two ways to deploy:

• single-cluster-setup/ — simple one-cluster install with Helm values in this folder.
• **base/ + overlays/ — Kustomize + Helm for multi-env (e.g., dev/prod/staging).

Alloy UI

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Prerequisites

Make sure the following are ready before running the commands:

• Docker Desktop (Kubernetes cluster enabled)
• Helm installed (brew install helm on MacOS)
• kustomize installed(brew install kustomize on MacOS)
• kubectl configured and pointing to your local cluster

You can check with:

kubectl get nodes
helm version
kustomize --help

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Quick Start (using Makefile)

You can use the included Makefile for quick setup.

cd single-cluster-setup/

Create and start everything

make create-namespace
make apply ENV=<ENV_NAME> #e.g ENV=dev

Kustomize build uses Helm charts under the hood, so make apply runs: kustomize build overlays/$ENV --enable-helm --load-restrictor=LoadRestrictionsNone | kubectl apply -f -

Check if all pods are running

make status

Delete everything (clean up)

make delete

Forward Alloy UI port

make pf

• Then open Alloy UI at http://localhost:12345

Helpful commands

# dev
kustomize build overlays/dev | kubectl apply -f -
kubectl -n monitoring rollout status deploy/alloy
kubectl -n monitoring get pods,svc,endpoints -l app.kubernetes.io/name=alloy -o wide

# port-forward Alloy UI
kubectl -n monitoring port-forward deploy/alloy 12345:12345
# open http://127.0.0.1:12345

# check active config and logs
kubectl -n monitoring exec deploy/alloy -c alloy -- sh -c 'sed -n "1,220p" /etc/alloy/config.alloy'
kubectl -n monitoring logs deploy/alloy -c alloy --tail=200

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What’s deployed

1. Alloy as a Deployment (1 replica) with:
   • Kubernetes discovery (pods/endpoints/…)
   • Metrics scrape for annotated targets
   • prometheus.relabel to add cluster, environment, region
   • prometheus.remote_write → Mimir
   • loki.source.kubernetes via K8s API → Loki
   • HTTP UI on :12345

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References

• Grafana Alloy Docs

• Grafana Loki logs in kubernetes

• Grafana Mimir/prometheus relabel example

• Grafana Helm Chart