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Build golden signals for Kubernetes HTTP APIs without cardinality sprawl

A practical flow for measuring traffic, errors, latency, and saturation with Prometheus, Grafana, and a label contract that does not burn the TSDB.

Define a label contract, create RED/USE recording rules, validate cardinality with promtool, and roll out Kubernetes API dashboards without turning every route into a series factory.

Created: July 7, 2026

Published: July 7, 2026

Estimated time40 min

LevelIntermediate

Before you startPrometheus scraping HTTP metrics or OpenTelemetry exporting compatible histograms.

PlatformsLinux / Docker

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Linux

Local validation with kubectl, promtool, and PromQL queries before publishing recording rules and dashboards.

kubectlpromtoolcurlPrometheus access

Open Prometheus and validate base queries

kubectl -n platform-observability port-forward svc/prometheus 9090:9090
promtool query instant http://localhost:9090 'sum by (service, route) (rate(http_server_request_duration_seconds_count{job="checkout-api"}[5m]))'
promtool query instant http://localhost:9090 'topk(20, count by (__name__, service, route, method, status_code)({service="checkout-api"}))'
promtool check rules rules/api-golden-signals.yaml
promtool test rules rules/api-golden-signals.test.yaml

Check that rules load

promtool check rules rules/api-golden-signals.yaml

Run fixtures before rollout

promtool test rules rules/api-golden-signals.test.yaml

Also available inMontar golden signals para APIs HTTP en Kubernetes sin disparar la cardinalidad

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