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

Building a custom service discovery

Even with all the available service discovery options, there are numerous other systems/providers that are not supported out of the box. For those cases, we've got a couple of options:

  • Open a feature request for Prometheus to support that particular service discovery, and rely on the community and/or maintainers to implement it.
  • Implement the service discovery integration yourself in Prometheus and either maintain a fork or contribute it back to the project.
  • Figure out a way to get the targets you require into your Prometheus instances with minimal maintenance work and time cost, and without relying on the Prometheus roadmap to get the job done.

The first two options aren't great, as they are either outside of our control or are cumbersome to maintain. Furthermore, adding additional service discovery integrations to Prometheus without...