Book Image

Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

By : Joel Bastos, Pedro Araújo
Book Image

Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

By: Joel Bastos, Pedro Araújo

Overview of this book

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system. It provides a modern time series database, a robust query language, several metric visualization possibilities, and a reliable alerting solution for traditional and cloud-native infrastructure. This book covers the fundamental concepts of monitoring and explores Prometheus architecture, its data model, and how metric aggregation works. Multiple test environments are included to help explore different configuration scenarios, such as the use of various exporters and integrations. You’ll delve into PromQL, supported by several examples, and then apply that knowledge to alerting and recording rules, as well as how to test them. After that, alert routing with Alertmanager and creating visualizations with Grafana is thoroughly covered. In addition, this book covers several service discovery mechanisms and even provides an example of how to create your own. Finally, you’ll learn about Prometheus federation, cross-sharding aggregation, and also long-term storage with the help of Thanos. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement and scale Prometheus as a full monitoring system on-premises, in cloud environments, in standalone instances, or using container orchestration with Kubernetes.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction
5
Section 2: Getting Started with Prometheus
11
Section 3: Dashboards and Alerts
15
Section 4: Scalability, Resilience, and Maintainability

Default Prometheus visualizations

Historically, Prometheus maintained its own tool to create dashboards, called PromDash. Over time, since Grafana improved its native support for Prometheus as a data source, the community began gravitating toward using Grafana as its primary visualization solution—so much so that PromDash was deprecated by the people who maintained Prometheus in favor of Grafana.

You can find the source code for PromDash at https://github.com/prometheus-junkyard/promdash.

Even though Grafana is the recommended visualization solution for most people, Prometheus also ships with an internal dashboarding feature called console templates. These console templates are written in raw HTML/CSS/JavaScript and leverage the power of the Go templating language to generate dashboards (called consoles) that are served by the Prometheus server itself. This makes them blazingly...