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Prometheus: Up & Running
book

Prometheus: Up & Running

by Brian Brazil
July 2018
Beginner to intermediate
386 pages
9h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Prometheus: Up & Running

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 analyse 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 I estimate that as of 2018, tens of thousands of organisations 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. Software like Kubernetes and Docker are already instrumented with Prometheus client libraries. For third-party software that exposes metrics in a non-Prometheus format, there are hundreds of integrations available. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492034131Errata Page