Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

Push versus pull

There is much debate in the monitoring community around the merits of each of these design decisions. The main point of contention is usually about target discovery, which we will discuss in the following paragraphs.

In push-based systems, the monitored hosts and services make themselves known by reporting to the monitoring system. The advantage here is that no prior knowledge of new systems is required for them to be picked up. However, this means that the monitoring service's location needs to be propagated to all targets, usually with some form of configuration management. Staleness is a big drawback of this approach: if a system hasn't reported in for some time, does that mean it's having problems or was it purposely ...