Prometheus: Open-Source Monitoring System
Prometheus is a leading open-source monitoring solution and time series database designed for reliability and scalability. It features a dimensional data model, a flexible query language (PromQL), efficient storage, and a modern alerting approach. Key features include:
- Dimensional Data Model: Time series are identified by metric names and key-value pairs, enabling detailed data analysis.
- Powerful Queries with PromQL: Allows for slicing and dicing data to create ad-hoc graphs, tables, and alerts.
- Visualization Options: Offers a built-in expression browser, Grafana integration, and console templates for data visualization.
- Efficient Storage: Stores data in memory and on local disk with a custom format, supporting scaling through functional sharding and federation.
- Simple Operation: Each server operates independently with local storage, written in Go for easy deployment with statically linked binaries.
- Precise Alerting: Defines alerts using PromQL with dimensional data, managed by an Alertmanager for notifications and silencing.
- Extensive Integrations: Supports numerous client libraries and exporters for bridging third-party data (e.g., Docker, HAProxy, StatsD, JMX metrics).
Prometheus is ideal for DevOps engineers, system administrators, and developers who need robust monitoring for cloud-native applications, microservices, and infrastructure. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project, it is 100% open source under the Apache 2 License, with a vibrant community and widespread adoption by companies like DigitalOcean, Docker, and SoundCloud.
