Cluster observability

Monitor pod status, node resource usage, and cluster-wide infrastructure metrics in real time from the Porter Infrastructure dashboard

Porter provides built-in observability for your cluster infrastructure through the Infrastructure dashboard. Access it by clicking Infrastructure in the left sidebar.

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Pods

The Pods tab provides a real-time view of all pods running in your cluster.

• Search: Filter pods by name
• Filters: Filter by status or namespace

Each pod displays:

Column	Description
Pod name	The name of the pod
Namespace	Kubernetes namespace (e.g., kube-system, default)
Status	Current state (Running, Pending, Failed, etc.)
Ready	Container readiness (e.g., 1/1)
Restarts	Number of container restarts
CPU	CPU usage
Memory	Memory usage
Memory %	Percentage of memory limit used
Age	Time since pod creation

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Nodes

The Nodes tab shows your cluster’s node groups and individual nodes.

Node Groups View

The default view displays all node groups:

Column	Description
Node group	Name of the node group (e.g., default, monitoring, system)
Instance type	The machine type for nodes in this group
Utilization	Visual indicator of resource usage
Actions	Link to view detailed metrics

Individual Nodes View

Click on a node group to see individual nodes:

• Node name: The cloud provider’s node identifier
• Node group: Which node group this node belongs to
• Instance type: The machine type
• CPU: CPU utilization shown as utilized (yellow) vs reserved (blue)
• Memory: Memory utilization shown as utilized (yellow) vs reserved (blue)
• Status: Node health status (Ready, NotReady)

Click Metrics > on any node group to view historical instance counts over time.

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Cluster metrics

The Cluster metrics view charts the health of Porter’s own in-cluster components. Use it when a system application is misbehaving — for example, when Prometheus is OOMing or filling its disk — to compare live usage against the pod’s requests and limits over time.

Open the view from the Infrastructure dashboard and pick a system application from the metrics picker.

Ingress NGINX

Charts the ingress controller that fronts your web services:

• CPU and Memory usage, with request and limit overlays
• Request rate, latency, and status code breakdowns

Use these charts to correlate an ingress incident (5xx spikes, elevated latency) with resource pressure on the controller pods.

Prometheus

Charts the in-cluster Prometheus stack that serves the metrics on this page:

• prometheus-server: CPU, Memory, and Storage (on-disk TSDB size, blocks plus WAL)
• kube-state-metrics: CPU and Memory

CPU and Memory carry request and limit overlays. Storage plots Prometheus’s self-reported TSDB size rather than PVC utilization, so there is no capacity ceiling drawn on the chart — watch the trend rather than a fill line.

These charts are served by the Prometheus instance they chart. Gaps during a Prometheus outage are expected and are themselves the signal that the stack is down.

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Integrating External Monitoring

For application-level monitoring and alerting, integrate with external observability platforms:

Datadog

Full-stack monitoring with APM, logs, and infrastructure metrics

New Relic

Application performance monitoring and alerting

Grafana

Dashboards and visualization for metrics and logs

See Third party observability or reach out to support for more information.