Prometheus Flashcards

📈 Prometheus Flashcards

Open-source monitoring & alerting toolkit for time series metrics

💡 What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system and time series database designed for collecting metrics, generating alerts, and enabling observability across systems.

🗄️ Time Series Database (TSDB)

Stores all metrics as timestamped key-value pairs, organized by metric name and labels for fast querying and long-term retention.

📥 Pull Model

Scrapes metrics from instrumented targets over HTTP at regular intervals, allowing dynamic discovery of services.

📤 Pushgateway

Component for accepting metrics pushed from short-lived jobs or batch processes, storing them for Prometheus to scrape.

🧮 PromQL

A flexible query language for aggregating, filtering, and transforming time series data, enabling complex analytics and visualizations.

🔍 Service Discovery

Automatically finds scrape targets through integrations like Kubernetes, Consul, EC2, DNS, and static configs.

🚨 Alertmanager

Receives alerts from Prometheus, deduplicates and groups them, then routes notifications to email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more.

📊 Metric Types

Supports four core metric types: counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries, each suited for different measurement patterns.

📦 Exporters

Plugins that expose metrics from third-party systems such as databases, web servers, hardware devices, and cloud services.

🛡️ Reliability

Runs standalone without external dependencies, using local storage for resilience and optional remote write for backups.

🔗 Grafana Integration

Easily connects to Grafana for building real-time dashboards and advanced visualizations using Prometheus queries.

🚀 Deployment

Deployable as a binary, Docker container, or Kubernetes service; supports scaling with federation and sharding for large environments.