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

Chapter 1, Monitoring Fundamentals

  1. A consensual definition of monitoring is hard to come by because it quickly shifts from industry or even in job-specific contexts. The diversity of viewpoints, the components comprising the monitoring system, and even how the data is collected or used, are all factors that contribute to the struggle to reach a clear definition.
  2. System administrators are interested in high resolution, low latency, high diversity data. Within this scope, the primary objective of monitoring is so that problems are discovered quickly and the root causes identified as soon as possible.
  3. Low resolution, high latency, and high diversity data.
  4. It depends on how broad you want to make the monitoring definition. Within the scope of this book, logging is not considered monitoring.
  5. The monitoring service's location needs to be propagated to all targets. Staleness is...