An open-source 🕵️‍♂️ Monitoring and 🚨 Alerting toolkit designed for highly dynamic environments, with a focus on Kubernetes and cloud-native services.

Notes

The Prometheus Team

Prometheus is not just a monitoring tool, it’s an observability platform.

Prometheus enables you to monitor your applications and infrastructure efficiently by collecting and storing time-series data, querying it using a powerful expression language, and setting up alerts based on custom rules.

Prometheus was originally built to monitor CoreOS cluster managers, but it has since evolved into a powerful and flexible open-source solution for monitoring complex systems. It offers features like multi-dimensional data querying, real-time alerts, and high-availability setup.

TakeAways

• 📌 Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool for highly dynamic environments with powerful querying capabilities and customizable alerts.
• 💡 Prometheus uses a pull-over-HTTP model for data collection, making it highly flexible and scalable.
• 🔍 Uses a multi-dimensional data model, allowing you to query across different dimensions (e.g., instance labels) simultaneously.
• 🔍 Supports multiple ways of visualizing time-series data through its Graphs API and 📈 Grafana integration.

Process

• Installation: Download the latest Prometheus binary from the official GitHub releases page and run it on your desired environment.
• Configuration: Create a prometheus.yml file to define scrape configurations, remote write settings, and alerts.
  • Example configuration:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'node_exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9100']

• Data Collection: Configure your desired exporters (e.g., Node Exporter for system-level metrics) and expose them on your target systems.
• Alerting: Define custom alerts in the prometheus.yml file using the Alertmanager section.
  • Example alert:

alerts:
  - name: InstanceDown
    expr: up == 0
    for: 1m
    labels:
      severity: critical
    annotations:
      summary: "Instance {{ $labels.instance }} is down"

Thoughts

• 🚨 High Alerting Capabilities: Prometheus allows you to create custom alerts based on your application’s needs, ensuring timely notifications of any issues.
• 📈 Powerful Querying: The multi-dimensional data model and expression language enable you to perform complex queries efficiently.
• 🌐 Flexibility: Prometheus supports various data collection methods, allowing it to monitor diverse systems and services.

Related

1. 🕵️‍♂️ Monitoring
2. Overview | Prometheus
3. Configuration | Prometheus