DevOps(Day-79): Prometheus 🔥

1. What is the Architecture of Prometheus Monitoring?

   Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting system that was originally developed at SoundCloud. It is designed for monitoring systems and applications in a distributed environment. The architecture of Prometheus consists of several key components that work together to collect, store, and process metrics data. Here is an overview of the Prometheus architecture:

   1. Prometheus Server: The core component that collects and stores metrics data.

   2. Data Collection: Metrics are obtained by scraping HTTP endpoints or using exporters.

   3. Service Discovery: Mechanisms to automatically find and monitor new targets.

   4. Alerting and Alertmanager: Define and handle alerts based on collected metrics.

   5. Data Storage: Metrics are stored in a local on-disk time-series database.

   6. Visualization and UI: Web-based interface for exploring metrics, querying, and visualization.

2. What are the Features of Prometheus?

   • Prometheus offers multiple graphing and dashboard options, allowing users to visualize metrics data in various ways.

   • Metrics collection in Prometheus follows a pull model over HTTP, where the server pulls data from the targets.

   • Prometheus utilizes a multidimensional data model, where time series data is associated with metric names and key-value pairs (KVP).

   • The PromQL query language in Prometheus supports the multidimensional nature of the data model, enabling powerful querying and analysis.

   • Prometheus operates as autonomous single server nodes, eliminating the need for distributed storage.

   • Target discovery in Prometheus can be achieved through static configuration or dynamic service discovery mechanisms.

   • Prometheus also provides the capability to push time series data through an intermediary gateway, allowing flexibility in data ingestion.

3. What are the Components of Prometheus?

   

   • Prometheus server - The Prometheus Server acts as the central hub for collecting, storing, processing, querying, and alerting on metrics data. It is a highly flexible and scalable component that forms the backbone of the Prometheus monitoring system.

   • Prometheus UI - The Prometheus UI serves as a user-friendly interface for interacting with Prometheus, allowing users to explore, analyze, and visualize metrics data, create custom dashboards, manage alerting rules, and monitor the status of targets and jobs.

   • Prometheus Alertmanager - Prometheus Alertmanager is a component of the Prometheus monitoring system that handles the management and routing of alerts triggered by Prometheus. It acts as a central hub for processing, deduplicating, grouping, and sending alerts to different notification channels.

   • Prometheus Pushgateway - The Prometheus Pushgateway serves as a bridge between Prometheus and short-lived or batch jobs, enabling the collection and inclusion of metrics from these jobs into the Prometheus monitoring system. It provides a convenient mechanism for pushing metrics to Prometheus, allowing for a more comprehensive monitoring solution.

4. What database is used by Prometheus?

   Prometheus uses its own built-in time-series database called the Prometheus Time Series Database (TSDB). It is optimized for storing and querying time-series data and is designed to efficiently handle the metrics collected by Prometheus. The TSDB provides compression, indexing, and retention capabilities to store and retrieve metrics data effectively. While Prometheus does not support external databases as its primary storage backend, it offers mechanisms for exporting or pushing data to other systems if long-term storage or additional analysis is required.

5. What is the default data retention period in Prometheus?

   The default data retention period is 15 days in Prometheus. Data would be automatically deleted after the data storage default retention duration has passed.

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WRITTEN BY Biswaraj Sahoo -- | DevOps Engineer | Docker | Linux | Jenkins | AWS | Git | Terraform | Docker | kubernetes

Empowering communities via open source and education. Connect with me over linktree: linktr.ee/biswaraj333