Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Supported metric types

When it comes to a sophisticated metrics collection system such as Prometheus, you would normally expect support for a wide array of metric types. Unless you have prior experience using Prometheus, you will probably be surprised to find out that it only supports four types of metrics. In practice, however, when these metric types are combined with the expressiveness of the PromQL language, these are all we need to model any type of SLI we can think of! Here is the list of metrics supported by Prometheus:

• Counters: A counter is a cumulative metric whose value increases monotonically over time. Counters can be used to track the number of requests to a service, the number of downloads for an application, and so on.