PromCon EU 2023

Talk abstract

Using Green Metrics to Monitor your Carbon Footprint

Speaker(s): Ida Fürjesová & Niki Manoledaki

Carbon emissions from cloud computing are estimated to be more than the emissions from aviation. In this talk we will show you how to take a bottom-up approach to monitoring energy consumption and carbon emissions at a granular level when deploying cloud-native software and provisioning infrastructure.

In order to reduce the carbon footprint of our infrastructure and software, the first step is to measure the energy consumption and carbon intensity of the applications we run and the tools we build. In this talk, we want to empower engineers to take control of the environments they are working in by setting up easy monitoring flows for gathering green metrics. Kepler, an eBPF energy monitoring tool and CNCF sandbox project, can export green metrics to Prometheus. Those metrics can then be visualized in Grafana, which provides an out-of-the-box support for Prometheus. We will demonstrate how to write PromQL queries that use Kepler metrics to monitor the energy consumed by Pods in namespaces. We will also show you how to convert energy metrics into carbon emission metrics.