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Prometheus 101 - Getting you started

Prometheus 101 - Getting you started

Monitoring the “up” status of your services is not enough if you want to know how your users experience them: you need to track response times, error rates, and throughput of your services. During incident investigation you want to correlate monitoring information from infrastructure and application level. For your business owners you want to create reports and dashboards to show the key performance indicators that matter.

Prometheus has been designed to process metrics to deliver the alerts and dashboards you need in your day-to-day work. Over the last releases it matured, gained a broad adoption in cloud computing and is now a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Its design focuses on simple and reliable operations.

Join this talk to learn about the basics of Prometheus, integrating it with your existing infrastructure, leveraging metrics at work, and to hear about its ecosystem and roadmap.

Alexander Schwartz

May 15, 2019
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  1. .consulting .solutions .partnership
    Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    Alexander Schwartz, Principal IT Consultant
    Continuous Lifecycle London, 2019-05-15

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  2. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 4
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  3. Installing and Configuring
    Monitoring
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 5
    Host & Application
    Metrics
    Alerts
    Dashboards

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  4. Installing and Configuring
    1. https://prometheus.io/
    Prometheus is a Monitoring System and Time Series Database
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 6
    Prometheus is an opinionated solution
    for
    instrumentation, collection, storage,
    querying, alerting, dashboards, trending

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  5. Installing and Configuring
    1. PromCon 2016: Prometheus Design and Philosophy - Why It Is the Way It Is - Julius Volz
    https://youtu.be/4DzoajMs4DM / https://goo.gl/1oNaZV
    Prometheus values …
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 7
    operational systems monitoring
    (not only) for the cloud
    simple single node
    w/ local storage for a few weeks
    horizontal scaling, clustering,
    multitenancy
    raw logs and events, tracing of requests, magic
    anomaly detection, accounting, SLA reporting
    over
    over
    over
    over
    over
    configuration files Web UI, user management
    pulling data from single processes
    pushing data from processes,
    aggregation on nodes
    NoSQL query & data massaging
    multidimensional data
    everything as float64
    point-and-click configurations,
    data silos,
    complex data types

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  6. Dashboard Host
    Alerting Host
    Compute Node
    Monitoring Host
    Compute Node
    Dashboard Host
    Installing and Configuring
    Direction of arrow: calls / initiated connections
    Technical Building Blocks
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 8
    Monitoring Host
    Grafana
    Metrics
    Config
    Dashboards
    Config
    Node Exporter
    cAdvisor
    Application
    Container
    Alerting Host
    Alerting State
    Config
    Host & Application
    Metrics
    Dashboards
    Alerts
    Alertmanager
    Service Discovery
    Prometheus

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  7. Installing and Configuring
    1. https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/09/20/prometheus-2-times-series-storage-performance-analyses/
    2. https://github.com/prometheus/prombench
    Installing Prometheus
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 9
    • Prometheus is written in the Go programming language
    • Standalone binaries available for different operating
    systems
    • Run the binaries directly or within a Docker container
    • The target machine needs:
     Fast local disk (SSD) to store the metrics history
     RAM to cache metrics history
    Native binaries for:
    Linux, *BSD
    Windows, macOS

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  8. Installing and Configuring
    1. https://www.robustperception.io/how-much-ram-does-prometheus-2-x-need-for-cardinality-and-ingestion
    2. https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/09/20/prometheus-2-times-series-storage-performance-analyses/
    3. https://github.com/Comcast/trickster
    4. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage/
    Sizing Prometheus
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 10
    “Prometheus 2 TSDB offers impressive performance, being able to
    handle a cardinality of millions of time series, and also to handle
    hundreds of thousands of samples ingested per second on rather
    modest hardware. CPU and disk IO usage are both very
    impressive. I got up to 200K/metrics/sec per used CPU core!”
    “[…] a million series costs around 2GiB of RAM in terms of
    cardinality, plus with a 15s scrape interval and no churn
    around 2.5GiB for ingestion”
    “Running queries will require additional RAM, both for any
    additional chunks pulled in from disk and for evaluating the
    expression.”
    Cited from:
    Peter Zaitsev, Percona Blog
    “On average, Prometheus uses only around 1-2
    bytes per sample [on disk].”
    needed_disk_space =
    retention_time_seconds
    * ingested_samples_per_second
    * bytes_per_sample
    Example:
    • 1000 exporters with 1000 metrics each
    polled every 15s: 66K metrics/sec
    • Retention 30 days: approx. 240 GB
    Cited from:
    Prometheus Docs
    Cited from:
    Brian Brazil, Robust Perception

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  9. global:
    scrape_interval: 15s
    rule_files:
    - '/etc/prometheus/alert.rules'
    alerting:
    alertmanagers:
    - static_configs:
    - targets:
    - 172.17.0.1:9093
    scrape_configs:
    - job_name: 'prometheus'
    scrape_interval: 5s
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['172.17.0.1:9090']
    metrics_path: /metrics
    Installing and Configuring
    1. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/
    2. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#file_sd_config
    3. https://www.robustperception.io/reloading-prometheus-configuration
    Configuring Prometheus
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 11
    • YAML configuration file
    • Alerting rules separate
    • Alert managers to notify
     in configuration file OR
     via service discovery
    • Targets to scrape:
     in configuration file OR
     via service discovery (Kubernetes, Consul, …) OR
     via separate YAML or JSON file (file_sd)
    • Web UI is read only (shows status and configuration)
    • Reloading configuration:
     sending SIGHUP to the process
     posting to special URL (if enabled on command line)

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  10. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 12
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  11. Prometheus Metrics format
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 13
    Capturing Metrics
    # HELP node_cpu Seconds the cpus spent in each mode.
    # TYPE node_cpu counter
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu0",mode="guest"} 0
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu0",mode="idle"} 4533.86
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu0",mode="iowait"} 7.36
    ...
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu0",mode="user"} 445.51
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu1",mode="guest"} 0
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu1",mode="idle"} 4734.47
    ...
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu1",mode="iowait"} 7.41
    node_cpu{cpu="cpu1",mode="user"} 576.91
    ...

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  12. Capturing Metrics
    Multidimensional Metric as stored by Prometheus
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 14
    576.91
    cpu: cpu1
    instance: 172.17.0.1:9100
    job: node-exporter
    __name__: node_cpu
    mode: user

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  13. Capturing Metrics
    Calculations based on metrics using PromQL
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 15
    Metric:
    node_cpu: Seconds the CPUs spent in each mode (Type: Counter).
    What percentage of a CPU is used per core?
    1 - rate(node_cpu{mode='idle'} [5m])
    What percentage of CPUs is used per instance?
    avg by (instance) (1 - rate(node_cpu{mode='idle'} [5m]))
    function filter parameter
    metric

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  14. Capturing Metrics
    Overview of exporters (abbreviated)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 16
    Name Use for… Cardinality Locality
    Node Exporter Host metrics on Linux systems one per Linux host on linux host
    cAdvisor Container metrics one per container host on container host
    Java Simple Client Java- and Application metrics one per Java application inside Java application
    JMX Exporter Java- and Application metrics one per Java application Java agent

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  15. Capturing Metrics
    Overview of exporters (abbreviated)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 17
    Name Use for… Cardinality Locality
    Node Exporter Host metrics on Linux systems one per Linux host on linux host
    cAdvisor Container metrics one per container host on container host
    Java Simple Client Java- and Application metrics one per Java application inside Java application
    JMX Exporter Java- and Application metrics one per Java application Java agent
    MySQL Exporter Database metrics one per database sidecar for database
    Graphite Exporter Converter for Graphite metrics single node independent
    SNMP Exporter Gateway to SNMP metrics single node independent
    Blackbox Exporter Probing remote endpoints (HTTP,
    DNS, TCP, …)
    single node independent
    Push Gateway Short-lived jobs that can’t be scraped single node independent

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  16. Capturing Metrics
    Capturing application metrics with Micrometer
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 18
    Micrometer [maɪˈkrɒm.ɪ.tər] is a facade (API), that allows to collect metrics
    in JVM applications independent of the metrics backend („SLF4J, but for metrics“).
    • Multidimensional metrics – a very good fit for Prometheus metrics model
    • Integrations for libraries and back ends
    (for example Prometheus, Datadog, Ganglia, Graphite)
    • Ready to use in Spring Boot 1.x and 2.x
    • Can also be used outside Spring Boot
    Homepage: https://micrometer.io/
    License: Apache 2.0

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  17. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 23
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  18. Creating Dashboards
    Grafana provides interactive dashboards
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 24
    • Query multiple sources (including Prometheus)
    • Provide interactive dashboards
    • Authentication/authorization to access/modify dashboards
    Homepage: https://grafana.com
    License: Apache 2.0

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  19. © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 25

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  20. © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 26

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  21. Creating Dashboards
    Grafana Demo
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 27
    • Adding Prometheus as a data source
    • Creating a dashboard
    • Using Grafana’s “Explore” perspective
    DEMO

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  22. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 28
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  23. groups:
    - name: example
    rules:
    - alert: HighErrorRate
    expr: >-
    sum by (uri) (... {status!='200') /
    sum by (uri) (...) > 0.1
    for: 30s
    labels:
    severity: page
    annotations:
    summary: >-
    URI {{ $labels.uri }}
    high error rate
    description: >-
    {{ $labels.uri }} has an error
    rate of {{ $value }}, that's
    more than 10% for more than 30
    seconds.
    Installing and Configuring
    1. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/alerting_rules/
    2. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/unit_testing_rules/
    3. https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/
    4. https://www.weave.works/blog/labels-in-prometheus-alerts-think-twice-before-using-them
    Configuring Alerts
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 29
    • YAML configuration file for Prometheus
    • Expression can be any valid PromQL expression
    • Annotations are available for notification templates
    • Unit Tests for alerts with promtool
    Advice: Alert for symptoms that have a customer
    facing impact and require immediate human
    intervention

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  24. route:
    receiver: 'alertmanager-bot'
    group_by: [alertname, datacenter, app]
    group_wait: 10s
    group_interval: 10s
    receivers:
    - name: 'alertmanager-bot'
    webhook_configs:
    - send_resolved: true
    url: 'http://172.17.0.1:9201'
    Installing and Configuring
    1. https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/configuration/
    2. https://www.weave.works/blog/labels-in-prometheus-alerts-think-twice-before-using-them
    Configuring Alertmanager
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 30
    • YAML configuration file
    • Multiple routes with different receivers and intervals
    possible
    • One notification bundles multiple alerts
    Not shown here: Notification templates for integrated
    receivers like for example slack

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  25. Sending Alerts
    Direction of arrow: calls / initiated connections
    1. https://github.com/free/jiralert
    2. https://github.com/metalmatze/alertmanager-bot
    Technical Building Blocks
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 31
    Monitoring Host
    Metrics
    Config
    Prometheus
    Alerts
    Pagerduty
    Slack
    jiralert
    alertmanager-bot
    JIRA
    Telegram
    (via Webhook)
    Alerting Host
    Alerting State
    Config
    Alertmanager
    (and other built
    in notifications)

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  26. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 32
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  27. prometheus_notifications_total
    process_cpu_seconds_total
    http_request_duration_seconds
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/naming/
    Naming Conventions for metrics
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 33
    • Single Name Application Prefix
    • Single Base Unit
    • Suffix with base unit
    • Same logical thing across all dimensions (read: labels)
    Use these naming conventions provides self-documenting
    metric names that can be use safely in PromQL and Grafana.

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  28. Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
    2. https://rancher.com/red-method-for-prometheus-3-key-metrics-for-monitoring/
    3. https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals
    What to measure – USE vs. RED vs. Four Golden Signals (FGS)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 34
    Using a consistent methods helps you to have the metrics you need at hand when analysing problems.
    Examples:
    Database connection pool (resource perspective): measure max and active connections and errors
    HTTP endpoint (request perspective): measure requests, errors and duration

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  29. Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
    2. https://rancher.com/red-method-for-prometheus-3-key-metrics-for-monitoring/
    3. https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals
    What to measure – USE vs. RED vs. Four Golden Signals (FGS)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 35
    Using a consistent methods helps you to have the metrics you need at hand when analysing problems.
    Examples:
    Database connection pool (resource perspective): measure max and active connections and errors
    HTTP endpoint (request perspective): measure requests, errors and duration
    Request based (RED)
    Rate
    Errors
    Duration

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  30. Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
    2. https://rancher.com/red-method-for-prometheus-3-key-metrics-for-monitoring/
    3. https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals
    What to measure – USE vs. RED vs. Four Golden Signals (FGS)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 36
    Using a consistent methods helps you to have the metrics you need at hand when analysing problems.
    Examples:
    Database connection pool (resource perspective): measure max and active connections and errors
    HTTP endpoint (request perspective): measure requests, errors and duration
    Request based (RED) Resource based (USE)
    Rate Utilization
    Errors Saturation
    Duration Errors

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  31. Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
    2. https://rancher.com/red-method-for-prometheus-3-key-metrics-for-monitoring/
    3. https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals
    What to measure – USE vs. RED vs. Four Golden Signals (FGS)
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 37
    Using a consistent methods helps you to have the metrics you need at hand when analysing problems.
    Examples:
    Database connection pool (resource perspective): measure max and active connections and errors
    HTTP endpoint (request perspective): measure requests, errors and duration
    Request based (RED) Resource based (USE) Service based (FGS)
    Rate Utilization Latency
    Errors Saturation Traffic
    Duration Errors Errors
    Saturation

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  32. http_server_requests_total{uri="/user/001"} 1.0
    http_server_requests_total{uri="/user/002"} 1.0
    http_server_requests_total{uri="/user/003"} 1.0
    http_server_requests_total{uri="/user/004"} 1.0
    ...
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. https://github.com/open-fresh/bomb-squad
    2. https://www.robustperception.io/using-sample_limit-to-avoid-overload
    Metrics Explosion
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 38
    • Each label value will create its on time series in Prometheus
    • High-cardinality labels on metrics will lead to a metrics explosion
    • Too many metrics will slow down Prometheus and Dashboards and make both unusable
    To avoid this: Use the configuration parameter sample_limit or use a tool like bomb-squad to
    automatically re-configure Prometheus.

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  33. groups:
    - name: example
    rules:
    - alert: MyJobMissingMyMetric
    expr: up{job="myjob"} == 1 unless my_metric
    for: 10m
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. https://www.robustperception.io/absent-alerting-for-scraped-metrics
    Alerting on missing metric
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 39
    • If an alerting rule doesn’t match any metric, it will not alert
    To avoid this: Use unless operator

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  34. groups:
    - name: example
    rules:
    - alert: MyJobMissing
    expr: absent(up{job="myjob"})
    for: 10m
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. https://www.robustperception.io/absent-alerting-for-jobs
    Alerting on no node available
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 40
    • If no node is available, a count and other operators will return no value
    To avoid this: Use absent operator

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  35. Watching out for Pitfalls
    1. https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/naming/
    High Availability
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 41
    • Use multiple Prometheus servers to scrape the same
    targets to provide high availability
    • Use multiple Alert Managers to de-duplicate alerts sent
    from Prometheus, but to ensure each alert is sent at least
    once
    Pros: Shared nothing infrastructure, moderate complexity
    Cons: Each Prometheus might have a different view
    Prometheus
    Slack
    Alertmanager
    Alertmanager
    Prometheus
    Application

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  36. Prometheus 101 – Getting you started
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 42
    Installing and Configuring
    1
    Capturing Metrics
    2
    Creating Dashboards
    3
    Sending Alerts
    4
    Watching out for Pitfalls
    5
    Summary
    6

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  37. Summary
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 43
    • Prometheus can ingest lots of metrics efficiently and stores them in its own
    time series database.
    • PromQL, the query language of Prometheus, can relate infrastructure and
    application metrics. It is the basis for dashboards and alerts.
    • Prometheus can run natively on multiple platforms and inside Docker
    containers.
    • For best results run with a fast local disk and enough RAM.
    • Metrics are pulled (“scraped”) from exporters; for short-lived jobs there is a
    push gateway.
    • Create a highly available, shared nothing infrastructure for production.
    • Use service discovery to pull metrics from new instances without manual
    re-configuration.

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  38. Links
    © msg | May 2019 | Prometheus 101 – Getting you started | Alexander Schwartz 44
    Prometheus
    https://prometheus.io/
    Grafana
    https://grafana.com/
    Robust Perception’s blog
    https://www.robustperception.io/blog
    Google’s SRE Book
    https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/
    Chrome Prometheus Formatter
    https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems @ahus1de
    PromCon
    https://promcon.io/
    Micrometer
    http://micrometer.io/
    My Blog Posts
    https://www.ahus1.de/post/micrometer
    https://www.ahus1.de/post/prometheus-and-grafana-talks

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  39. .consulting .solutions .partnership
    Alexander Schwartz
    Principal IT Consultant
    +49 171 5625767
    [email protected]
    msg systems ag
    Mergenthalerallee 73-75, 65760 Eschborn
    Deutschland
    www.msg.group

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