Kubernetes surely makes it easy for developers to scale applications, but it also makes them harder to observe. Pods are transient in nature, they get created, destroyed, and rescheduled constantly. Without proper monitoring, a pod stuck in CrashLoopBackOff or Pending state consuming too much memory might go unnoticed until users start complaining.

That’s where monitoring and alerting come in. By tracking pod status, resource usage, and failures, you gain visibility into the health of your workloads and can act before small issues turn into major outages.

In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how you can set up Kubernetes pod monitoring in under 15 minutes using SigNoz Cloud and OpenTelemetry. We’ll instrument a cluster, collect metrics, and configure alerts so you’ll leave with a working monitoring setup you can extend for production.

Why Monitor Pods?

Pods are the basic execution unit in Kubernetes. They run your applications, but they’re also ephemeral and fragile, they can restart, get evicted, or fail silently if you’re not watching. Monitoring them gives you:

• Failure Alert:
  • Catch pods stuck in CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, or Pending before they impact users.
  • Detect liveness/readiness probe failures quickly.
• Resource Visibility:
  • Identify pods hitting memory or CPU limits (common cause of OOMKilled errors).
  • Right-size resource requests/limits → avoid both wasted capacity and outages.
• Faster Troubleshooting:
  • Correlate pod restarts with deployments, config changes, or node issues.
  • Cut down time to debug by seeing status and metrics in one place.
• Reliability & SLAs:
  • Ensure only healthy pods are serving traffic.
  • Reduce downtime and meet service-level objectives.
• Scaling & Optimization:
  • Monitor pod performance to tune Horizontal/Vertical Pod Autoscalers.
  • Optimize costs by avoiding over-provisioning.

In short, without pod monitoring, you’re flying blind in Kubernetes. With it, you gain the observability needed to keep workloads reliable, efficient, and resilient and Open source platform like SigNoz can help with it.

How SigNoz brings Observability ?

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform built to give you end-to-end visibility across your applications and infrastructure. It unifies the three pillars of observability:

1. Metrics 📊
   • Application metrics like latency, throughput, and error rates.
   • Infrastructure metrics (nodes, containers, pods, VMs, cloud services).
   • Business metrics (custom KPIs you emit via OpenTelemetry).
2. Logs 📜
   • Centralized log collection across applications, pods, and services.
   • Full-text search and filtering to debug failures or anomalies.
   • Correlation with metrics and traces for faster root cause analysis.
3. Traces 🔗
   • Distributed tracing across microservices.
   • End-to-end visibility into request flows, including bottlenecks and slow dependencies.
   • Seamless linking from a slow span → related logs → resource metrics.

Why rely on SigNoz ?

SigNoz being built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), can ingest telemetry data from almost anywhere:

• Kubernetes clusters (pods, nodes, services).
• Applications (instrumented in Python, Java, Go, Node.js, etc.).
• Cloud services (databases, queues, APIs).
• Custom business metrics (your own domain-specific telemetry