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 2, An Overview of the Prometheus Ecosystem

  1. The main components are Prometheus, Alertmanager, Pushgateway, Native Instrumented Applications, Exporters, and Visualization solutions.
  2. Only Prometheus and scrape targets (whether they are natively instrumented or use exporters) are essential for a Prometheus deployment. However, to have alert routing and management, you also need Alertmanager; Pushgateway is only required in very specific use cases, such as batch jobs; while Prometheus does have basic dashboarding functionality built in, Grafana can be added to the stack as the visualization option.
  3. Not all applications are built with Prometheus-compatible instrumentation. Sometimes, no metrics at all are exposed. In these cases, we can rely on exporters.
  4. The information should be quickly gathered and exposed in a synchronous operation.
  5. Alerts will be sent from both sides of...