Prometheus Monitoring 101

Prometheus is an increasingly popular tool in the world of SREs and operational monitoring. Based on ideas from Google’s internal monitoring service (Borgmon), and with native support from services like Docker and Kubernetes, Prometheus is designed for a cloud-based, containerized world. As a result, it’s quite different from existing services like Graphite.
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Starting out, it can be tricky to know where to begin with the official Prometheus docs and the wave of recent Prom content. This article acts as a high level overview of how Prometheus works, its positives and challenges for monitoring, and where MetricFire can help. You can also try a 14-day free trial of MetricFire’s Hosted Prometheus, and start to get experience using Hosted Prometheus right away.

What is Prometheus and how does it work?

Prometheus is an application (written in Go) which can be run directly on a server, in a docker container, or as part of e.g. a Kubernetes cluster. You tell it where to find metrics by configuring a list of “scrape jobs”. Each job specifies endpoints to scrape, or configures service discovery to obtain endpoints automatically. For example, a job to scrape Kubernetes would contain the Kubernetes API server endpoint. The Kubernetes API then returns the endpoints to scrape for current nodes or pods …

Read the rest of this article on the MetricFire website.
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