Prometheus #
- Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud (2021).
- Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data
- Prometheus was the second project accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes, and also the second to graduate.
- Prometheus and Grafana can be used as complementary services that, together, provide a robust time-series database with excellent data visualization.
- Primarily relies on Polling to pull data from the application or any system. Client libraries are available for instrumenting the applications in many supported languages like Java, Python, Go, etc.
Main Features (Official Docs) #
Click here for official docs.
- Offfers a multi-dimensional data model with time series data
- Supports a Query Language - PromQL
- No reliance on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
- Time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP
- Pushing time series is supported via an intermediary gateway
- Targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
- Multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support-
Architecture #
Alternative Options #
- InfluxDB, Graphite for Time series data
- ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana)
- Cloud Providers - AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor
- Observability/APM Vendors - New Relic, Dynatrace, etc.
Local Installation #
Any of the below options:
- Download the JAR and Run directly
- Use brew install
brew install prometheus
#Run directly with
/usr/local/opt/prometheus/bin/prometheus_brew_services
#Or automatic installation
brew services restart prometheus
- Docker with default configuration
docker run -p 9090:9090 prom/prometheus
Local access #
- URL: http://localhost:9090/, http://localhost:9090/metrics
- Enter Expression: prometheus_target_interval_length_seconds or rate(prometheus_tsdb_head_chunks_created_total[1m])
Read more about getting started here.