The kubernetes-mixin is a popular resource for providing excellent dashboards and alerts for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. However, there’s still not much in place yet for autoscaling tools like PDBs, HPAs/VPAs, KEDA, Karpenter, or the Cluster Autoscaler. These essential components are commonly deployed in Kubernetes environments but don't have standardized, open source monitoring solutions. This blog post aims to solve that by introducing the kubernetes-autoscaling-mixin - a set of Prometheus rules and Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes autoscaling. This mixin includes coverage for Kubernetes core components such as HPA and PDB, as well as additional components like the KEDA, VPA, Karpenter, and the Cluster Autoscaler, ensuring you have visibility into the autoscaling mechanisms that keep your cluster running efficiently.

The Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) can manage both your pods' resource requests but also recommend what the limits and requests for a pod should be. Recently, the kube-state-metrics project removed built-in support for VPA recommendation metrics, which made the VPA require additional configuration to be valuable. This blog post will cover how to configure the VPA to expose the recommendation metrics and how to visualize them in Grafana.