<p>I've set up Prometheus and Grafana for tracking and monitoring of my Kubernetes cluster. </p>

<p>I've set up 3 Nodes for my cluster. </p>

<p>I have 26 pods running (mostly monitoring namespace).</p>

<p>I have one major Node app (deployment) running and right now there isn't any load. </p>

<p>I'm trying to understand these graph metrics. However I can't understand why there's such high CPU cores usage despite there being no load on the app.</p>

<p>Here's a grafana screenshot</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqmNb.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/MqmNb.png" alt="Grafana"></a></p>

<p>24% memory usage I can understand as there are Kubernetes processes running as well such as kube-system etc. </p>

<p>And it's also telling me my cluster can support 330 pods (currently 26). I'm only worried about high cpu cores. Can anybody explain it. </p>

Alamgir Qazi
<p>82% is not the CPU usage of the processes but the ratio of requested to allocatable resources (2.31 / 2.82 =  0.819 --> ~82%).</p>

<p>This means that out of your 2.82 available (allocatable CPUs), you requested (allocated) about 82% for pods in the monitoring namespace but that does not mean they actually use that much CPU.</p>

<p>To see actual CPU usage, look at metrics like <code>container_cpu_usage_seconds_total</code> (per container CPU usage) or maybe even <code>process_cpu_seconds_total</code> (per process CPU usage).</p>
