Chapter 1. What Is Prometheus?
Prometheus is an open source, metrics-based monitoring system. Of course, Prometheus is far from the only one of those out there, so what makes it notable?
Prometheus does one thing and it does it well. It has a simple yet powerful data model and a query language that lets you analyze how your applications and infrastructure are performing. It does not try to solve problems outside of the metrics space, leaving those to other more appropriate tools.
Since its beginnings with no more than a handful of developers working in SoundCloud in 2012, a community and ecosystem has grown around Prometheus. Prometheus is primarily written in Go and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. There are hundreds of people who have contributed to the project itself, which is not controlled by any one company. It is always hard to tell how many users an open source project has, but we estimate that as of 2022, hundreds of thousands of organizations are using Prometheus in production. In 2016 the Prometheus project became the second member1 of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
For instrumenting your own code, there are client libraries in all the popular languages and runtimes, including Go, Java/JVM, C#/.Net, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Haskell, Erlang, and Rust. Many popular applications are already instrumented with Prometheus client libraries, like Kubernetes, Docker, Envoy, and Vault. For third-party software that exposes metrics in a non-Prometheus format, ...
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