The author of the article runs a blog and other resources on Kubernetes, specifically in a K3s cluster. They use Telegraf and InfluxDB to monitor everything in their cluster. The author uses two components: InfluxDB Cloud for external monitoring and a Helm chart from Telegraf, modified to adapt to K3s. The author configures InfluxDB Cloud by creating an account, creating a bucket, generating an access token, and specifying the Org ID and URL. They then modify the values.yaml file to use InfluxDB Cloud as the output for Telegraf. The author installs the Helm chart using Helm and updates the repo. After installation, they check that everything is running properly by checking the pod status and tailing the logs. Finally, they verify that data is being written to InfluxDB Cloud by navigating to the Explore section.