Overview of Prometheus monitoring and alerting
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for Kubernetes and microservices architectures. It operates by scraping and storing metrics from configured targets at defined intervals using a local on-disk time series database.
Key architectural components include:
- Exporters: Services that expose metrics in a standard format for Prometheus to scrape.
- Service Discovery: Mechanisms (such as Kubernetes integration) that allow Prometheus to automatically find targets.
- Alerting Rules: User-defined conditions that trigger notifications when specific metric thresholds are met.
- PromQL: A specialized query language used to analyze and aggregate time-series metric data.
Prometheus is frequently paired with Grafana for data visualization and dashboarding.