Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

An overview of the two collection approaches

In push-based monitoring systems, emitted metrics or events are sent either directly from the producing application or from a local agent to the collecting service, like so:

Figure 1.1: Push-based monitoring system

Systems that handle raw event data generally prefer push since the frequency of event generation is very high—in the order of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands per second, per instance—which would make polling data impractical and complex. Some sort of buffering mechanism would be needed to keep events generated between polls, and event freshness would still be a problem ...