What is Prometheus?
Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting system. It was developed by SoundCloud in 2012, but at the time of writing, it is a standalone project. So, it is entirely maintained by the community, independently of any company.
The main features of Prometheus are as follows:
- It has a multidimensional data model, with metrics pairs in key/value form.
- It uses a flexible query language called PromQL.
- It collects metrics using pulls over HTTP. You can also push metrics using a push gateway.
- You can build dashboards using the tools provided by Prometheus. However, in this book, you will learn how to use Grafana for that purpose.
The metric definition in Prometheus is the same one that we have been using throughout this book. It consists of pairs of keys and values that are delivered in a time sequence. These metrics are stored in a time-series database.
Architecture
Prometheus’s ecosystem has many components:
-
...
