Prometheus

Prometheus is considered the industry standard monitoring tool for Kubernetes and cloud native environments. It was created by SoundCloud in 2012 when they realised existing monitoring tools weren’t good enough for what they needed. It was donated to the CNCF as an open-source project in 2016 and became the second project to graduate the CNCF in late 2018.

It’s a common pattern to run cloud native applications on Kubernetes, use Prometheus for monitoring and alerting, and use Grafana for dashboards and visualisation.

How Prometheus works

At a high level, every microservice should generate high-quality telemetry in the form of logs and metrics. Prometheus collects these and stores them where they can be queried and analysed to help with troubleshooting and optimisation. It can also feed into Grafana for high-quality dashboards and visualisations.

Digging a little deeper…

Prometheus expects applications to expose metrics via the /metrics HTTP endpoint...