Prometheus Concepts

Internal

• Prometheus

Overview

Prometheus is a time series database plus tools to collect metrics to be stored in the database. Prometheus is a solution for system monitoring.

Target

Prometheus will monitor targets. A target can be a server, database, virtual machine, etc.

Pull vs. Push

Prometheus will pull metrics, by scraping the targets. The retrieval is done by invoking HTTP into endpoints, which are defined in the configuration.

Sources of Metrics

Instrumented Applications

Prometheus pulls metrics from instrumented applications. An instrumented application exposes Prometheus metrics on a given URL. Such an application will be identified by Prometheus as a target and scrapped at regular periods.

Exporters

An alternative are prebuilt exporters. Examples: node exporter, SQL exporter, HAProxy exporter.