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Getting started with Prometheus
Watching the Shop
Whether you are managing several multicloud-hosted machines or just a home server for hobby purposes, one thing matters: Stuff has to work. If it doesn't, you must have a reactive way to become aware of it. A manual check is daunting and bordeline senseless.
Observability is all about having a complete overview of and ever watchful eye on your infrastructure. The legacy approach of installing agents here and there has shown its flaws, especially when it comes to observing infrastructure data that the server application isn't designed to monitor.
A Metrics-Oriented Approach
In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the Titan that gifted fire to humanity, but in this article, Prometheus is an open source application that, since its first release in 2016, has offered a new way to monitor and observe infrastructure by collecting metrics of its monitoring targets in a scheduled manner and storing them in a time series database (TSDB). (See the "What Is a Metric?" box.) Once the metrics are stored and available, it allows for in-depth querying and timely evaluation through a proprietary query language called PromQL [1]. Such queries can be used to create alerts rules that notify you whenever your target behavior drifts from the expected.
What Is a Metric?
A metric is a value produced by a system at a specific instant. Typically, the value represents the same information collected at various points over a period of time. A classic example would be noting the temperature and the time each time you read your home thermometer. At the end of the day, you could put that data on a graph with time on the x -axis and temperature on the y -axis and have yourself a nice graph. This approach is also tremendously useful when
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