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

Summary

In this chapter, we had the opportunity to discover some of the most used Prometheus exporters available. Using test environments, we were able to interact with operating-system-level exporters running on VMs and container-specific exporters running on Kubernetes. We found that sometimes we need to rely on logs to obtain metrics and went through the current best options to achieve this. Then, we explored blackbox probing with the help of blackbox_exporter and validated its unique workflow. We also experimented with pushing metrics instead of using the standard pull approach from Prometheus, while making clear why sometimes this method does indeed make sense.

All these exporters enable you to gain visibility without having to natively instrument code, which sometimes is much more costly than relying on community-driven exporters.

With so many sources of metrics, now is...