Janakiram MSV Walks Through Turning a Seeed Wio Terminal Into an Always-On Kubernetes Dashboard

Those working with Kubernetes clusters often need to check on the health and status at-a-glance, and a new project from The New Stack's Janakiram MSV makes that as simple as possible — thanks to Seeed Studio's Wio Terminal.

"The Wio Terminal had given me the idea to build a mini-Prometheus dashboard that shows the vital statistics of a Kubernetes cluster running at the edge. With a bit of effort, I translated the idea into a working prototype," MSV explains. "Essentially, we have three components for this project — The Wio Terminal device, a wrapper service, and the Prometheus deployment running on Kubernetes."

While it's possible for the Wio Terminal, which includes a 2.4" color display and Arduino-compatible microcontroller with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and an optional battery pack, to query the Prometheus REST API directly, processing the data can be a little much for a microcontroller — hence MSV's use of a wrapper service that acts as a bridge between Prometheus and the Wio Terminal.

The single-screen dashboard offers at-a-glance monitoring of the Kubernetes version in use, the number of nodes currently active in the cluster, CPU and memory usage, the number of pods, and the number of containers. The software side is compatible with any Kubernetes cluster, though MSV tested the project on Seeed's Odyssey Blue J4105 Mini PC. Data is transferred via Wi-Fi, meaning the Wio Terminal needs only a connection to power in order to stay updated.

The full tutorial can be found on The New Stack, while the source code has been published to GitHub under an unspecified license.