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 4, Prometheus Metrics Fundamentals

  1. Time series data can be defined as a sequence of numerical data points collected chronologically from the same source – usually at a fixed interval. As such, this kind of data, when represented in a graphical form, will plot the evolution of the data through time, with the x-axis being time and the y-axis the data value.
  2. A timestamp, a value, and tags/labels.
  3. The write-ahead log (WAL).
  4. The default is 2h and should not be changed.
  5. A float64 value and a timestamp with millisecond precision.
  6. Histograms are especially useful for tracking bucketed latencies and sizes (for example, request durations or response sizes) as they can be freely aggregated across different dimensions. Another great use is to generate heatmaps (the evolution of histograms over time).
    Summaries without quantiles are quite cheap to generate, collect, and store...