Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database that is designed for metric collection, alerting, and visualization. It was created by SoundCloud in 2012 and has been part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016.
Prometheus focuses on giving developers and systems administrators an easy way to monitor the various metrics associated with their apps and services. It can be used for traditional monitoring tasks such as collecting metrics from hosts and services, as well as for more complex tasks such as performing distributed tracing, logging application-level metrics, and alerting.
Prometheus is a powerful monitoring system that provides a wide range of features. Here are some of the main features of Prometheus:
- Flexible Query Language: The Prometheus query language allows users to query a wide variety of different metrics, including built-in metrics, user-defined metrics, and labels associated with those metrics.
- Horizontal Scaling: Prometheus is designed to be horizontally scalable, meaning that it can easily scale to large numbers of nodes without sacrificing performance or reliability.
- Time Series Storage: Prometheus is designed to store millions of time series, making it ideal for large-scale deployments.
- Alerting: Prometheus includes a built-in alerting system that can notify users via email or SMS when certain conditions are met.
- Service Discovery: Prometheus includes service discovery mechanisms that allow it to automatically detect new nodes in a cluster and monitor them.
- Label-Based Aggregation: Prometheus allows users to aggregate metrics based on labels, making it easier to identify trends and visualize data.
- Custom Dashboards: Prometheus includes a simple web-based dashboard that can be used to visualize and explore data.
- Extensibility: Prometheus can be extended with custom plugins and exporters, allowing users to easily extend and enhance its functionality.
