Kubernetes Pod CPU Usage Percentage in Grafana: Monitor CPU Consumption Per Pod

To visualize CPU usage per pod, create a Time Series panel in Grafana and use the following PromQL query:

sum (rate (container_cpu_usage_seconds_total{pod!="",namespace=~"^$namespace$"}[5m])) by (pod)

What Does This Query Do?

container_cpu_usage_seconds_total

This metric is exposed by cAdvisor and represents the cumulative CPU time consumed by a container.

Since it is a counter, the value continuously increases over time as the container consumes CPU resources.

rate(...[5m])

The rate() function calculates how quickly the counter is increasing over the last 5 minutes.

Instead of showing the total CPU time consumed since the pod started, it shows the current CPU consumption rate.

namespace=~"^$namespace$"

This filter limits the query to the namespace selected in your Grafana dashboard variable.

If your dashboard variable contains production, Grafana effectively evaluates:

namespace=~"^production$"

This ensures only pods from the selected namespace are included.

pod!=""

Excludes metrics that do not contain a pod label.

Without this filter, you may end up graphing data that isn't associated with a Kubernetes pod.

Many Kubernetes pods contain multiple containers. The query sums CPU consumption across all containers belonging to the same pod, giving you a single CPU usage value per pod.

Understanding the Results

The query returns CPU usage in CPU cores.

For example:

Pod	CPU Value
api-pod	0.50
worker-pod	1.25
frontend-pod	0.15

This means:

• 0.50 = Half of one CPU core
• 1.00 = One full CPU core
• 1.25 = One and a quarter CPU cores
• 2.00 = Two full CPU cores

Configure the chart unit as Percent (0-100). When your Grafana panel is configured to display percentages, Grafana will automatically convert these values into a more human-friendly percentage output format.

For example, if the query returns a CPU value of 0.50 for a pod, Grafana will display it as 50% when the panel unit is set to Percent (0-100). Likewise, 0.15 becomes 15%, while 1.25 becomes 125%, indicating the pod is consuming the equivalent of 1.25 CPU cores.

Pod	CPU Value	Displayed Percentage
api-pod	0.50	50%
worker-pod	1.25	125%
frontend-pod	0.15	15%

It's worth noting that percentages above 100% are possible because the underlying metric represents CPU cores consumed. A value of 1.25 means the pod is using one and a quarter CPU cores, not 125% of its configured CPU limit.

 Apply the following graph settings as shown below:

These settings when applied should create you a graph that shows the current CPU usage for the namespace you have selected on your page drop down.

#grafana #prometheus