Skip to main content

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open source system monitoring and alerting product.

How it works

Prometheus is a time series database which can be used to store metric data for analysis, monitoring, and alerting. In order to be used, you need to create metrics with a unique key and type, and then set data to it at continuous time intervals.

In order to use Prometheus, two parts are needed.

  1. A Prometheus server running on the network.
  2. One or more targets of prometheus metric data. This data could come from a node service, or a plain text file.

Exporters

Exporters are used to get data from existing software into the Prometheus metric format so it can be consumed by the Prometheus server. For example the RabbitMQ exporter to get queue information.

Metrics

Possible metric types are defined on the documentation website.

What to do with metric data

Once you have a prometheus server which is collecting metrics on a regular basis, it can be connected to someting like Kibana to visualize the metrics and create dashboards.

How to's

Monitoring cron jobs with prometheus

https://janikvonrotz.ch/2020/09/07/monitor-cron-jobs-with-prometheus-grafana-and-node-exporter/