Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It is designed for reliability and scalability, making it a popular choice for monitoring modern cloud-native and containerized environments.
🌟 Key Features
- Time Series Database: Stores metrics as time series data, identified by metric name and key/value pairs.
- Powerful Query Language (PromQL): Enables flexible querying and aggregation of metrics.
- Pull Model: Prometheus scrapes metrics from instrumented targets at specified intervals.
- Service Discovery: Automatically discovers targets via integrations with Kubernetes, Consul, and more.
- Alerting: Integrated alert manager for sending notifications based on metric thresholds.
- Visualization: Built-in expression browser and integration with Grafana for dashboards.
🧩 Use Cases
- Infrastructure and application monitoring
- Container and Kubernetes monitoring
- Service-level objectives (SLOs) and alerting
- Real-time analytics and observability
🛠️ Ecosystem & Tools
- Alertmanager: Handles alerts sent by Prometheus server.
- Grafana: Popular dashboard tool for visualizing Prometheus data.
- Sloth: Sloth helps define and manage SLOs with Prometheus.
- Exporters: Collect metrics from third-party systems (e.g., node_exporter, blackbox_exporter).
📚 Resources
📝 Notes
- Prometheus uses a pull-based model, but pushgateway can be used for short-lived jobs.
- Metrics are stored locally; remote storage integrations are available for long-term retention.
- Prometheus is widely used in DevOps and SRE practices for observability.