Installing the Kubernetes Metrics Server

The Kubernetes metrics server is an aggregator of resource usage data in your cluster, and it is not deployed by default in Amazon EKS clusters. The metrics server is commonly used by other Kubernetes add ons, such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or the Kubernetes Dashboard. For more information, see Resource metrics pipeline in the Kubernetes documentation. This topic explains how to deploy the Kubernetes metrics server on your Amazon EKS cluster.

Choose the tab below that corresponds to your desired installation method:

curl and jq

To install metrics-server from GitHub on an Amazon EKS cluster using curl and jq

If you have a macOS or Linux system with curl, tar, gzip, and the jq JSON parser installed, you can download, extract, and install the latest release with the following commands. Otherwise, use the next procedure to download the latest version using a web browser.

1. Open a terminal window and navigate to a directory where you would like to download the latest metrics-server release.

2. Copy and paste the commands below into your terminal window and type Enter to execute them. These commands download the latest release, extract it, and apply the version 1.8+ manifests to your cluster.

   DOWNLOAD_URL=$(curl -Ls "https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/latest" | jq -r .tarball_url)
   DOWNLOAD_VERSION=$(grep -o '[^/v]*$' <<< $DOWNLOAD_URL)
   curl -Ls $DOWNLOAD_URL -o metrics-server-$DOWNLOAD_VERSION.tar.gz
   mkdir metrics-server-$DOWNLOAD_VERSION
   tar -xzf metrics-server-$DOWNLOAD_VERSION.tar.gz --directory metrics-server-$DOWNLOAD_VERSION --strip-components 1
   kubectl apply -f metrics-server-$DOWNLOAD_VERSION/deploy/1.8+/

3. Verify that the metrics-server deployment is running the desired number of pods with the following command.

   kubectl get deployment metrics-server -n kube-system

   Output:

   NAME             DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   metrics-server   1         1         1            1           56m

Web browser

To install metrics-server from GitHub on an Amazon EKS cluster using a web browser

1. Download and extract the latest version of the metrics server code from GitHub.

   1. Navigate to the latest release page of the metrics-server project on GitHub (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/latest), then choose a source code archive for the latest release to download it.

      Note

      If you are downloading to a remote server, you can use the following wget command, substituting the alternate-colored text with the latest version number.

      wget -O v0.3.6.tar.gz https://codeload.github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/tar.gz/v0.3.6

   2. Navigate to your downloads location and extract the source code archive. For example, if you downloaded the .tar.gz archive, use the following command to extract (substituting your release version).

      tar -xzf v0.3.6.tar.gz

2. Apply all of the YAML manifests in the metrics-server-0.3.6/deploy/1.8+ directory (substituting your release version).

   kubectl apply -f metrics-server-0.3.6/deploy/1.8+/

3. Verify that the metrics-server deployment is running the desired number of pods with the following command.

   kubectl get deployment metrics-server -n kube-system

   Output:

   NAME             DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   metrics-server   1         1         1            1           56m