Azure Observability Stack

Azure Observability Stack

Use platform observability intent and cluster access to deploy, validate, and operate Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager with concrete command evidence.

When to invoke

• "Deploy the observability stack for Open Horizons."
• "Configure monitoring for platform components."
• "Create or manage Grafana dashboards."
• "Configure alerting rules and notification channels."
• "Troubleshoot platform metrics, targets, alerts, or logs."

Prerequisites and context

• kubectl access to target cluster.
• Helm 3.12+ installed.
• AKS cluster deployed (H1 Foundation).

Procedure

Installation and deployment

1. Deploy kube-prometheus-stack

# Add Helm repos
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

# Create namespace
kubectl create namespace monitoring

# Install kube-prometheus-stack with project values
helm install monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack   --namespace monitoring   --values deploy/helm/monitoring/values.yaml   --wait --timeout 15m

# Verify all pods are running
kubectl get pods -n monitoring
kubectl wait --for=condition=ready pod -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=monitoring -n monitoring --timeout=600s

2. Deploy Custom Dashboards

# Create ConfigMap from project dashboards
kubectl create configmap grafana-dashboards   --namespace monitoring   --from-file=grafana/dashboards/   --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

# Label for Grafana sidecar auto-discovery
kubectl label configmap grafana-dashboards   --namespace monitoring   grafana_dashboard=1

3. Deploy Custom Alert Rules

# Apply Prometheus alerting rules
kubectl apply -f prometheus/alerting-rules.yaml -n monitoring

# Apply recording rules
kubectl apply -f prometheus/recording-rules.yaml -n monitoring

# Validate rules syntax
promtool check rules prometheus/alerting-rules.yaml
promtool check rules prometheus/recording-rules.yaml

4. Verify Installation

# Check all components
kubectl get pods -n monitoring

# Port-forward Grafana
kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/monitoring-grafana 3000:80

# Port-forward Prometheus
kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/monitoring-kube-prometheus-prometheus 9090:9090

# Check Prometheus targets
curl -s http://localhost:9090/api/v1/targets | jq '.data.activeTargets | length'

# Verify Grafana datasources
GRAFANA_USER="${GRAFANA_USER:-admin}"
GRAFANA_PASSWORD="${GRAFANA_PASSWORD:?Set GRAFANA_PASSWORD from your secret store}"
curl -s -u "${GRAFANA_USER}:${GRAFANA_PASSWORD}" http://localhost:3000/api/datasources | jq '.[].name'

Day-2 operations

Prometheus Operations

# Check Prometheus status
kubectl get pods -n monitoring -l app.kubernetes.io/name=prometheus

# Port forward Prometheus
kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/monitoring-kube-prometheus-prometheus 9090:9090

# Query Prometheus API
curl -s http://localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=up | jq '.data.result'

# Check targets
curl -s http://localhost:9090/api/v1/targets | jq '.data.activeTargets | length'

Grafana Operations

# Check Grafana status
kubectl get pods -n monitoring -l app.kubernetes.io/name=grafana

# Port forward Grafana
kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/monitoring-grafana 3000:80

# List data sources
GRAFANA_USER="${GRAFANA_USER:-admin}"
GRAFANA_PASSWORD="${GRAFANA_PASSWORD:?Set GRAFANA_PASSWORD from your secret store}"
curl -s -u "${GRAFANA_USER}:${GRAFANA_PASSWORD}" http://localhost:3000/api/datasources | jq '.[].name'

Alert Management

# Check alertmanager
kubectl get pods -n monitoring -l app.kubernetes.io/name=alertmanager

# List active alerts
curl -s http://localhost:9093/api/v2/alerts | jq '.[].labels.alertname'

# Validate Prometheus rules
promtool check rules prometheus/alerting-rules.yaml

Output template

Return exactly this structure:

# Observability stack result

**Status:** PASS | FAIL | BLOCKED
**Summary:** One sentence describing monitoring readiness or the issue found.

### Component status
| Component | Namespace | Result | Evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Prometheus | monitoring | PASS | Pod, target, or API evidence |
| Grafana | monitoring | PASS | Pod or datasource evidence |
| Alertmanager | monitoring | PASS | Pod or alert evidence |

### Details
- Commands executed or recommended.
- Dashboards, rules, or values files validated.
- Active alerts, scrape errors, or log findings.

### Validation evidence
- Pods: PASS | FAIL with `kubectl` summary.
- Rules: PASS | FAIL with `promtool` summary.
- Datasources or targets: PASS | FAIL with API summary.

Limits

• Do not use this skill for application logging code.
• Use terraform-cli (skill) instead when the task is Terraform IaC for observability infrastructure.
• Use kubectl-cli (skill) instead when the task is direct Kubernetes inspection outside observability workflows.
• Use pipeline-diagnostics (skill) instead when the task is CI/CD pipeline diagnostics.

Progressive disclosure and bundled resources

• references/project-reference.md: project file paths and observability best practices.
• references/troubleshooting.md: Prometheus, Grafana, and scrape-error troubleshooting commands.

Related primitives

Quality gate

• Helm, kubectl, and cluster prerequisites are verified before install or operation.
• Pod readiness is checked for monitoring components.
• Prometheus targets or API queries provide evidence for metrics readiness.
• Grafana datasources or dashboards are verified when Grafana is in scope.
• Prometheus alerting and recording rules are checked when rule files are in scope.
• Secrets such as GRAFANA_PASSWORD are read from the secret store or environment, not written into output.