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Visualize Cassandra Metrics with Grafana Dashboard

KubeDB exposes Cassandra metrics through a sidecar exporter. Once Prometheus scrapes those metrics, you can visualize them in Grafana using pre-built KubeDB dashboards. This tutorial walks through the full setup: deploying the monitoring stack, enabling monitoring on a Cassandra instance, and importing the Grafana dashboards.

Before You Begin

• You need a Kubernetes cluster with kubectl configured. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using kind.

• KubeDB must be installed in your cluster with kubedb-metrics enabled. Follow the setup guide here and make sure to include the flag below during installation:

  --set kubedb-metrics.enabled=true
  

  kubedb-metrics creates MetricsConfiguration objects for each database type, which Panopticon (Step 2) uses to expose metrics to Prometheus.

• To keep monitoring resources isolated, we use a separate monitoring namespace and deploy the database in the demo namespace.

  $ kubectl create ns monitoring
  namespace/monitoring created
  
  $ kubectl create ns demo
  namespace/demo created
  

Note: YAML files used in this tutorial are stored in docs/examples/cassandra/monitoring folder in GitHub repository kubedb/docs.

Configuration

These two steps — deploying kube-prometheus-stack and installing Panopticon — are shared prerequisites for all KubeDB database monitoring guides. If you have already completed them in another guide, skip to Step 1.

Step 1: Deploy kube-prometheus-stack

kube-prometheus-stack installs Prometheus, Prometheus Operator, Alertmanager, and Grafana together. This is the recommended way to get the full monitoring stack on Kubernetes.

Add the prometheus-community Helm repo and install:

$ helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
$ helm repo update

$ helm upgrade --install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --set grafana.image.tag=7.5.5

Wait for all pods to be ready:

$ kubectl get pods -n monitoring
NAME                                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
alertmanager-prometheus-kube-prometheus-alertmanager-0 2/2     Running   0          2m
prometheus-grafana-xxxx                                3/3     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-prometheus-operator-xxxx               1/1     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus-0                2/2     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-state-metrics-xxxx                     1/1     Running   0          2m

Find the serviceMonitorSelector label that Prometheus uses to pick up ServiceMonitor objects. You will need this label when enabling monitoring on the Cassandra instance.

$ kubectl get prometheus -n monitoring -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.serviceMonitorSelector}'
{"matchLabels":{"release":"prometheus"}}

The label is release: prometheus.

Step 2: Install Panopticon

Panopticon is the Appscode operator that reads MetricsConfiguration objects created by kubedb-metrics and exposes them to Prometheus. It must be installed before enabling kubedb-metrics.

$ helm repo add appscode https://charts.appscode.com/stable/
$ helm repo update

$ helm upgrade --install panopticon appscode/panopticon \
  --version v2026.4.30 \
  --namespace kubeops --create-namespace \
  --set monitoring.enabled=true \
  --set monitoring.agent=prometheus.io/operator \
  --set monitoring.serviceMonitor.labels.release=prometheus \
  --set-file license=/path/to/kubedb-license.txt \
  --wait --timeout 5m0s

Verify panopticon is running:

$ kubectl get pods -n kubeops
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
panopticon-xxxx               1/1     Running   0          1m

Setup

Step 1: Deploy Cassandra with Monitoring Enabled

Below is the Cassandra object with monitoring configured to use Prometheus Operator.

apiVersion: kubedb.com/v1alpha2
kind: Cassandra
metadata:
  name: cassandra-grafana-demo
  namespace: demo
spec:
  version: "5.0.3"
  topology:
    rack:
      - name: r0
        replicas: 3
        storage:
          accessModes:
            - ReadWriteOnce
          resources:
            requests:
              storage: 1Gi
        storageType: Durable
  deletionPolicy: WipeOut
  monitor:
    agent: prometheus.io/operator
    prometheus:
      serviceMonitor:
        labels:
          release: prometheus
        interval: 10s

Here,

• monitor.agent: prometheus.io/operator tells KubeDB to create a ServiceMonitor for this instance.
• monitor.prometheus.serviceMonitor.labels must match the serviceMonitorSelector label of your Prometheus (release: prometheus).
• monitor.prometheus.serviceMonitor.interval sets the scrape interval to 10 seconds.

Create the Cassandra instance:

$ kubectl create -f https://github.com/kubedb/docs/raw/v2026.6.19/docs/examples/cassandra/monitoring/cassandra-grafana-demo.yaml
cassandra.kubedb.com/cassandra-grafana-demo created

Wait for it to be Ready:

$ kubectl get cassandra -n demo cassandra-grafana-demo
NAME                     VERSION   STATUS   AGE
cassandra-grafana-demo   5.0.3     Ready    3m

KubeDB creates a stats service named {cassandra-name}-stats for the exporter:

$ kubectl get svc -n demo --selector="app.kubernetes.io/instance=cassandra-grafana-demo"
NAME                          TYPE        CLUSTER-IP    EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)     AGE
cassandra-grafana-demo        ClusterIP   10.96.10.1    <none>        9042/TCP    3m
cassandra-grafana-demo-stats  ClusterIP   10.96.10.2    <none>        56790/TCP   3m

KubeDB also creates a ServiceMonitor in the demo namespace:

$ kubectl get servicemonitor -n demo
NAME                          AGE
cassandra-grafana-demo-stats  3m

Verify it carries the correct label:

$ kubectl get servicemonitor -n demo cassandra-grafana-demo-stats -o jsonpath='{.metadata.labels}'
{"release":"prometheus", ...}

Step 2: Verify Prometheus is Scraping

Port-forward the Prometheus pod:

$ kubectl port-forward -n monitoring \
  prometheus-prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus-0 9090
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:9090 -> 9090
Forwarding from [::1]:9090 -> 9090

Open http://localhost:9090/targets in your browser. Look for an entry whose service label matches cassandra-grafana-demo-stats. Its state should be UP.

If the target is missing, check that the ServiceMonitor label (release: prometheus) matches the Prometheus serviceMonitorSelector.

Step 3: Access Grafana

Port-forward the Grafana service:

$ kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus-grafana 3000:80
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:3000 -> 80

Open http://localhost:3000. The username is admin. Retrieve the auto-generated password from the secret:

$ kubectl get secret -n monitoring prometheus-grafana \
  -o jsonpath='{.data.admin-password}' | base64 -d

After a successful login you will see the Grafana home page:

Step 4: Configure Prometheus as a Data Source

If you installed Grafana via kube-prometheus-stack, Prometheus is already configured as the default data source — skip to Step 5.

For a standalone Grafana installation:

1. Go to Connections → Data sources → Add new data source.

2. Select Prometheus.

3. Set the URL to your Prometheus service:

   http://prometheus-operated.monitoring.svc:9090
   

4. Click Save & test. You should see Data source is working.

Step 5: Import KubeDB Cassandra Dashboards

The KubeDB Cassandra dashboards are distributed as JSON files. Each JSON file is a complete dashboard definition — panels, queries, variables, and layout — that Grafana loads in one shot. Without importing, you would have to build every panel and write every PromQL query by hand. Importing lets you skip that entirely.

Three dashboards are available. Download all three JSON files from the appscode/grafana-dashboards repository (cassandra/ folder):

Import steps (repeat for each file):

1. In Grafana, click Dashboards in the left sidebar.
2. Select Import from the menu.
3. Click Upload dashboard JSON file and select one of the downloaded .json files.
4. In the Prometheus dropdown that appears, select your Prometheus data source.
5. Click Import.

The import page looks like this:

After importing both files, they will appear under Dashboards in the left sidebar.

Step 6: Explore the Dashboards

After opening a dashboard, use the dropdown filters at the top to focus on a specific instance.

KubeDB / Cassandra / Summary — cluster-level overview:

• Database Status — current health of the Cassandra cluster
• Version — Cassandra version running
• Total Nodes — number of nodes in the rack
• Read / Write Latency — p99 read and write request latency
• Compaction Tasks — pending and completed compaction tasks
• Heap Usage — JVM heap used vs. max across nodes
• CPU / Network — resource usage over time

KubeDB / Cassandra / Database — table and keyspace metrics:

• SSTable Count — number of SSTables per table
• Disk Usage — disk space consumed per keyspace
• Live / Tombstone Cells — ratio of live cells to tombstones (high tombstone ratio indicates GC pressure)
• Bloom Filter False Positive Rate — effectiveness of bloom filters per table

KubeDB / Cassandra / Pod — per-pod operational metrics, scoped to a single Cassandra pod:

• Node status — whether the selected pod’s Cassandra node is up
• Cluster ops — operations per second broken down by type (Read, Write, CasRead, CasWrite, RangeSlice, ViewWrite)
• Operations per instance — operations per second aggregated per pod
• Read / Write operations — read and write throughput for the selected pod

Cleaning up

# Remove the Cassandra instance
kubectl delete cassandra -n demo cassandra-grafana-demo

# Remove namespaces
kubectl delete ns demo

# Uninstall monitoring stack (optional)
helm uninstall prometheus -n monitoring
helm uninstall panopticon -n kubeops
kubectl delete ns monitoring kubeops

Next Steps

• Monitor your Cassandra database with KubeDB using built-in Prometheus.
• Monitor your Cassandra database with KubeDB using Prometheus Operator.
• Want to hack on KubeDB? Check our contribution guidelines.