Technologies

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open-source project maintained independently of any company. Prometheus is designed for monitoring highly dynamic containerized environments like those orchestrated by Kubernetes, but it also works well for traditional workloads.

At its core, Prometheus stores all its data as time series: streams of timestamped values belonging to the same metric and the same set of labeled dimensions. This data model is simple yet powerful, making it easy to perform complex queries and analyses.

Prometheus collects metrics from monitored targets by scraping HTTP endpoints on these targets. This makes it easy to instrument applications and services with client libraries that expose metrics in a format Prometheus can understand. Prometheus also supports remote service discovery, which means it can automatically discover and monitor new instances of a service as they come online.

One of Prometheus’ key features is its powerful query language, PromQL, which allows users to perform ad-hoc queries and create custom dashboards and alerts. PromQL supports a wide range of operations, including arithmetic, aggregation, and filtering, making it possible to answer complex questions about your infrastructure’s performance and health.

Prometheus also comes with a built-in alerting system that can trigger notifications based on predefined alerting rules. These rules can be defined using PromQL expressions and can be configured to send notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, or other channels.

In addition to its core features, Prometheus has a vibrant ecosystem of integrations and exporters that make it easy to monitor a wide range of systems and services. There are exporters available for popular databases, web servers, and cloud providers, as well as libraries for integrating Prometheus with other monitoring systems like Grafana for visualization.

Overall, Prometheus is a powerful and flexible monitoring solution that is well-suited for modern, dynamic environments. Its simple yet powerful data model, powerful query language, and rich ecosystem of integrations make it a popular choice for monitoring infrastructure and applications in a wide range of use cases.