📈 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.