Monitoring a Kubernetes environment requires a different approach than monitoring VM-based workloads or even unorchestrated containers. The good news is that Kubernetes provides APIs for automation and cluster management, including robust APIs for collecting performance data. In this article, we'll delve into the data you can collect from these APIs to monitor the Kubernetes platform itself. We will cover three broad categories of metrics: Cluster state metrics, Resource metrics from Kubernetes nodes and pods, and Work metrics from the Kubernetes Control Plane. Additionally, we will touch on the value of collecting Kubernetes events.