Multi-Cluster Monitoring on GCP

This setup provides multi-cluster monitoring using Grafana and Victoria Metrics on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It supports high availability, efficient metric collection, and visualization for multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Infrastructure Components

• Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Global VPC: Used for inter-cluster communication
• GKE Version: 1.28
• Ingress: Nginx Ingress Controller for routing
• Monitoring Stack:
  • Victoria Metrics Cluster (HA): Stores and processes metrics
  • Grafana (HA): Visualizes metrics with a database backend
  • vm-agent: Collects metrics from multiple clusters
  • Blackbox Exporter: Monitors API health
• Deployment Tools:
  • Kustomization + Helm: Used for managing configurations

Architecture

graph TD
C[(vm-agent-cluster1)] --> B
D[(vm-agent-cluster2)] --> B
E[(vm-agent-cluster3)] --> B
B((Victoria Metrics Cluster
Master )) --> Metrics --> A(( Grafana ))

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Scaling Considerations

• Deploy Victoria Metrics in HA mode to handle large-scale metrics.
• Use Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) for long-term storage.
• Scale vm-agent replicas based on cluster size.

Security Best Practices

• Enable TLS for Grafana and Victoria Metrics endpoints.
• Use RBAC policies in GKE to restrict access.
• Implement IAM roles in GCP for controlled access.

Conclusion

This multi-cluster monitoring setup ensures robust observability across multiple GKE clusters. It leverages Victoria Metrics for efficient metric storage and Grafana for advanced visualization and alerting.