The standard for metrics monitoring — scrape, store, query with PromQL, and alert on the health of your systems.

Welcome to Prometheus: Monitoring and Metrics.

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.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

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