Now, the next step is to learn about the Prometheus. Prometheus has emerged as a popular open-source solution for collecting and analyzing time-series data.
With its flexible architecture, powerful querying language, and rich set of features, Prometheus has become a go-to choice for monitoring modern systems and applications.
In this blog, we will dive into what Prometheus is, explore its architecture, highlight its key features, discuss its components, delve into its database, and shed light on the default data retention period.
What is Prometheus?
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system developed by SoundCloud and is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
It is designed for monitoring the performance and health of systems, applications, and services in a highly dynamic and distributed environment.
Prometheus adopts a pull-based approach, where it scrapes metrics from target systems at regular intervals, stores them, and enables querying and alerting based on this data.
The Architecture of Prometheus Monitoring:
Prometheus follows a simple and scalable architecture. It consists of the following components:
Prometheus Server: The core component responsible for data collection, storage, and retrieval. It regularly scrapes metrics from target endpoints using HTTP or specialized exporters.
Exporters: These are agent-like processes that expose metrics of specific services or systems in a format that Prometheus understands. Exporters enable Prometheus to collect metrics from various technologies such as databases, web servers, or message queues.
Data Storage: Prometheus employs a time-series database to store collected metrics. The data is stored locally on disk, allowing for high performance and reliability.
Alertmanager: Responsible for handling and sending alerts based on predefined rules and conditions. It integrates with Prometheus and enables users to define alerting rules and configure various notification channels.
Client Libraries: Prometheus offers client libraries in different programming languages. These libraries assist in instrumenting applications to expose custom metrics and integrate with the Prometheus server.
Key Features of Prometheus:
Prometheus boasts several key features that contribute to its popularity among developers and DevOps teams:
Powerful Query Language: Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) allows flexible querying and analysis of time-series data, facilitating complex data exploration and visualization.
Dynamic Service Discovery: Prometheus supports service discovery mechanisms like DNS, Kubernetes, and Consul, making it easy to monitor dynamic environments with auto-scaling services.
Alerting and Notification: Prometheus allows the creation of alerting rules based on metric thresholds or conditions. Alertmanager handles notifications via email, PagerDuty, Slack, and other channels.
Metrics Visualization: Prometheus integrates with popular visualization tools like Grafana, enabling the creation of rich and customizable dashboards for visualizing metric data.
Time-Series Data Retention: Prometheus stores data in a compact and efficient format, making it suitable for long-term data retention and analysis.
Components of Prometheus:
The key components of Prometheus are:
Prometheus Server: Responsible for data collection, storage, retrieval, and processing.
Exporters: Agents that expose metrics of target systems or services.
Alertmanager: Handles alerts and notifications based on defined rules.
Pushgateway: Used for capturing and pushing batch jobs or short-lived service metrics to Prometheus.
Client Libraries: Available in various languages to instrument applications and expose custom metrics.
Database Used by Prometheus
Prometheus utilizes its custom-built time-series database called the Prometheus TSDB.
The TSDB is designed specifically for the requirements of Prometheus monitoring, offering efficient storage, fast queries, and compact data representations.
It employs a compressed, append-only storage model optimized for write performance.
Data Retention Period in Prometheus
By default, Prometheus retains collected data for 15 days. However, this period can be customized based on specific needs by adjusting the configuration.
Retention settings control the duration for which the data remains accessible and queryable in Prometheus.
Longer retention periods may require additional storage resources, so it is essential to strike a balance between retention duration and available storage capacity.
Thank You,
I want to express my deepest gratitude to each and every one of you who has taken the time to read, engage, and support my journey.
Feel free to reach out to me if any corrections or add-ons are required on blogs. Your feedback is always welcome & appreciated.
~ Abhisek Moharana 🙂