Technology · Ebook

Prometheus: Monitoring and Metrics

by Shriira Press

Prometheus is the de facto standard for metrics monitoring: it scrapes metrics from your systems, stores them as labeled time series, lets you query them with the powerful PromQL language, and alerts you when something is wrong. This free book teaches it from the ground up: the time-series data model (labels, counters/gauges/histograms), the pull-based architecture and scraping with service discovery, exporters and instrumentation, PromQL from basics to depth (rates, aggregation, histograms/percentiles, recording rules), alerting with rules and Alertmanager, visualization with Grafana, storage/performance/scaling (the cardinality pitfall, remote storage, Thanos/Cortex), and operating Prometheus in production. Ten focused chapters with real PromQL and clear diagrams that show how to monitor any system — collecting, querying, alerting on, and visualizing the metrics that reveal its health.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What Prometheus Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — Metrics and the Data Model
4. 4Chapter 3 — Architecture and the Pull Model
5. 5Chapter 4 — Exporters and Instrumentation
6. 6Chapter 5 — PromQL Basics
7. 7Chapter 6 — PromQL in Depth
8. 8Chapter 7 — Alerting
9. 9Chapter 8 — Visualization with Grafana
10. 10Chapter 9 — Storage, Performance, and Scaling
11. 11Chapter 10 — Operating Prometheus and Putting It Together