64 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
64 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Prometheus
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description: Tool overview for Prometheus as a metrics collection, query, and alerting platform
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tags:
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- prometheus
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- monitoring
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- observability
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category: tools
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created: 2026-03-14
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updated: 2026-03-14
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---
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# Prometheus
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## Summary
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Prometheus is an open source monitoring system built around time-series metrics, pull-based scraping, alert evaluation, and queryable historical data. It is a standard choice for infrastructure and service monitoring in self-hosted environments.
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## Why it matters
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Prometheus gives operators a consistent way to collect metrics from hosts, applications, and infrastructure components. It is especially valuable because it pairs collection, storage, and alert evaluation in one practical operational model.
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## Core concepts
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- Scrape targets and exporters
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- Time-series storage
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- PromQL for querying and aggregation
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- Alerting rules for actionable conditions
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- Service discovery integrations for dynamic environments
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## Practical usage
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Prometheus commonly fits into infrastructure as:
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```text
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Targets and exporters -> Prometheus -> dashboards and alerts
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```
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Typical uses:
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- Scraping node, container, and application metrics
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- Evaluating alert rules for outages and resource pressure
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- Providing metrics data to Grafana
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## Best practices
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- Start with critical infrastructure and user-facing services
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- Keep retention and scrape frequency aligned with actual operational needs
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- Write alerts that map to a human response
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- Protect Prometheus access because metrics can reveal sensitive system details
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## Pitfalls
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- Collecting too many high-cardinality metrics without a clear reason
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- Treating every metric threshold as an alert
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- Forgetting to monitor backup freshness, certificate expiry, or ingress paths
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- Running Prometheus without a retention and storage plan
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## References
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- [Prometheus overview](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/)
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- [Prometheus concepts](https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/)
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- [Prometheus configuration](https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/)
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