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 10, Discovering and Creating Grafana Dashboards

  1. Grafana supports automatic provisioning of data sources by reading YAML definitions from a provisioning path at startup.
  2. Steps to import a dashboard from the Grafana gallery are as follows:
    1. Choose a dashboard ID from the grafana.com gallery.
    2. In the target Grafana instance, click on the plus sign in the main menu on the left-hand side and select Import from the sub-menu.
    3. Paste the chosen ID in the appropriate text field.
  1. Variables allow a dashboard to configure placeholders that can be used in expressions and title strings, and those placeholders can be filled with values from either a static or dynamic list, which are usually presented to the dashboard user in the form of a drop-down menu. Whenever the selected value changes, Grafana will automatically update the queries in panels and title strings that use that respective...