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

Setting up alerting in Prometheus

So far, we have covered how PromQL can be invaluable in querying the collected data, but when we require an expression to be continuously evaluated so that an event is triggered when a defined condition is met, we're promptly stepping into alerting. We explained how alerting is one of the components of monitoring in Chapter 1, Monitoring Fundamentals. To be clear, Prometheus is not responsible for issuing email, Slack, or any other forms of notification; that is the responsibility of another service. This service is typically Alertmanager, which we'll go over in Chapter 11, Understanding and Extending Alertmanager. Prometheus leverages the power of alerting rules to push alerts, which we'll be covering next.

What is an alerting rule...