Install metrics-server

CKS and the metrics-server

CKS clusters created after July 7, 2025 do not include metrics-server; if your workloads need it, install it yourself as described on this page.
Clusters created before July 7, 2025 include a CoreWeave-managed metrics-server in the kube-system namespace, so you don’t need to install your own. See the July 7, 2025 release notes for details about this change.

Metrics-server is not required for core cluster functionality. It serves the Kubernetes Metrics API, which powers kubectl top node and kubectl top pod and provides real-time metrics to the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). Metrics-server only affects kubectl top and HPA. Metrics shown in CoreWeave Grafana are collected through a separate pipeline and don’t depend on metrics-server. To collect custom application metrics, see Forward application metrics.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

At least one CPU Node in your cluster to run the metrics-server Pods.
kubectl access to your CKS cluster with permission to create resources in the kube-system namespace. See Obtain access with a kubeconfig file.
Helm version 3 or later installed on your workstation.

Install the chart

Install the upstream metrics-server Helm chart into the kube-system namespace:

helm repo add metrics-server https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/metrics-server/
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install metrics-server metrics-server/metrics-server \
  --namespace kube-system

Confirm the Deployment is ready:

kubectl get deployment metrics-server --namespace kube-system

You should see 1/1 in the READY column:

Example output

NAME             READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
metrics-server   1/1     1            1           60s

Verify the Metrics API

Query Node metrics:

kubectl top nodes

If metrics-server is working correctly, the command returns CPU and memory usage for each Node:

Example output

NAME      CPU(cores)   CPU(%)   MEMORY(bytes)   MEMORY(%)
g123ab4   512m         1%       12480Mi         9%
g567cd8   4210m        3%       98304Mi         14%

Metrics can take a minute or two to appear after installation.

Last modified on July 22, 2026

​Prerequisites

​Install metrics-server

Prerequisites

Install metrics-server