What is Prometeus?

Prometeus is an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open source project under very active development. Prometeus works by scraping metrics from configured targets at given intervals, storing the metrics, and providing a web interface to visualize and query the metrics. It also allows you to configure alerting rules based on metric values.

Some key capabilities and features of Prometeus include:

• A multi-dimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key/value pairs
• A flexible query language (PromQL) to leverage labels for on-the-fly aggregation
• No reliance on distributed storage - single server nodes are autonomous
• Time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP
• Target discovery service via same HTTP pull model scraping
• Pushing time series also supported via an intermediary gateway
• Targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
• Multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support
• Support for hierarchical federation to scale to large environments

Prometeus is well-suited for monitoring dynamic cloud environments and microservices. It integrates well with Kubernetes and Docker environments. The simple data model and query language makes analytics easy without requiring much technical expertise. The extensive graphing integrations with Grafana allows you to build rich visual dashboards easily.

Official Links