Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability in cloud-native and DevOps environments.
Collects metrics from servers, containers, applications, and services.
Stores metrics in a time-series database.
Supports querying using PromQL (Prometheus Query Language).
Integrates with Grafana for dashboards and visualization.
Triggers alerts when metrics exceed thresholds.
Analogy: If Kubernetes is traffic control, Prometheus is the traffic camera and sensors monitoring speed, traffic flow, and incidents.
Why Prometheus is Used in DevOps
Prometheus supports DevOps practices by providing real-time monitoring, alerting, and observability.
Monitoring Applications & Infrastructure – Collects metrics from containers, VMs, and services.
Alerting & Notifications – Sends alerts to Slack, email, PagerDuty, etc.
Scalability – Handles monitoring for dynamic environments (like Kubernetes clusters).
Integration With CI/CD – Ensures new deployments don’t break system performance.
Troubleshooting & Optimization – Helps identify bottlenecks and failures quickly.
Example workflow: Application deployed → Prometheus scrapes metrics → Metrics visualized in Grafana → Alerts trigger if thresholds exceeded.
What is the Purpose of Using Prometheus?
Metrics Collection :
Collects system and application metrics at regular intervals.
Time-Series Database :
Stores metrics efficiently and supports historical queries.
Alerting :
Automatically triggers alerts for abnormal system behavior.
Service Monitoring :
Monitors containerized microservices, databases, and APIs.
Visualization :
Works with Grafana to create dashboards for insights.
Querying :
PromQL allows flexible, powerful queries over collected metrics.
Scalability :
Can monitor large clusters, multiple services, and dynamic environments.
Advantages of Using Prometheus
Highly Reliable & Resilient :
Pull-based model ensures metrics are collected even if targets fail temporarily.
Scalable :
Designed to handle thousands of targets in dynamic environments.