How UW Madison Monitors 25+ Clusters With Cilium and Prometheus Agent on a Student-Sized Budget

Discover how the University of Wisconsin Madison successfully monitors over 25 Kubernetes clusters using Cilium and Prometheus Agent while maintaining a student-friendly budget in this 25-minute conference talk. Learn how to capture Layer 7 network insights across multiple clusters without the overhead of traditional sidecar deployments by combining Cilium's eBPF networking capabilities with Prometheus Agent's remote write functionality to stream rich flow telemetry to a centralized Grafana stack. Watch a live demonstration where speakers fire test traffic with curl from a single application pod and observe real-time Cilium Flow Metrics spikes and Alertmanager notifications within seconds, showcasing the power of sidecar-free monitoring. Gain practical insights into scrape-target pruning techniques, discovery patterns that work in air-gapped research environments, and honest lessons learned about what components failed first and the solutions implemented to address these challenges. Explore this field-tested approach that demonstrates how to achieve lightweight service mesh and observability solutions that fit within university budget constraints while maintaining comprehensive monitoring capabilities across distributed Kubernetes infrastructure.