Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Day-2 Operations: Monitoring and Scaling

Introduction

Deploying an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster is relatively straightforward. However, true operational excellence begins on “Day 2″—the stage where production workloads go live, and you must maintain cluster stability, observe systemic behavior, and manage cluster resources dynamically under unpredictable traffic loads.

Monitoring Infrastructure and Workloads

To prevent widespread outages, your monitoring layer must track performance across two dimensions: cluster infrastructure and containerized workloads. Using Prometheus and Grafana, you can easily scrape metrics via a custom ServiceMonitor manifest:

apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: ServiceMonitor
metadata:
  name: app-monitor
  namespace: production
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: web-service
  endpoints:
  - port: metrics
    interval: 15s