Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

Build Prometheus ecosystems with metric-centric visualization, alerting, and querying

Key Features

• Integrate Prometheus with Alertmanager and Grafana for building a complete monitoring system
• Explore PromQL, Prometheus' functional query language, with easy-to-follow examples
• Learn how to deploy Prometheus components using Kubernetes and traditional instances

Book Description

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system. It provides a modern time series database, a robust query language, several metric visualization possibilities, and a reliable alerting solution for traditional and cloud-native infrastructure.

This book covers the fundamental concepts of monitoring and explores Prometheus architecture, its data model, and how metric aggregation works. Multiple test environments are included to help explore different configuration scenarios, such as the use of various exporters and integrations. You'll delve into PromQL, supported by several examples, and then apply that knowledge to alerting and recording rules, as well as how to test them. After that, alert routing with Alertmanager and creating visualizations with Grafana is thoroughly covered. In addition, this book covers several service discovery mechanisms and even provides an example of how to create your own. Finally, you'll learn about Prometheus federation, cross-sharding aggregation, and also long-term storage with the help of Thanos.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to implement and scale Prometheus as a full monitoring system on-premises, in cloud environments, in standalone instances, or using container orchestration with Kubernetes.

What you will learn

• Grasp monitoring fundamentals and implement them using Prometheus
• Discover how to extract metrics from common infrastructure services
• Find out how to take full advantage of PromQL
• Design a highly available, resilient, and scalable Prometheus stack
• Explore the power of Kubernetes Prometheus Operator
• Understand concepts such as federation and cross-shard aggregation
• Unlock seamless global views and long-term retention in cloud-native apps with Thanos

Who this book is for

If you're a software developer, cloud administrator, site reliability engineer, DevOps enthusiast or system admin looking to set up a fail-safe monitoring and alerting system for sustaining infrastructure security and performance, this book is for you. Basic networking and infrastructure monitoring knowledge will help you understand the concepts covered in this book.

Table of Contents

1. Monitoring Fundamentals
2. An Overview of the Prometheus Ecosystem
3. Setting Up a Test Environment
4. Prometheus Metrics Fundamentals
5. Running a Prometheus Server
6. Exporters and Integrations
7. Prometheus Query Language - PromQL
8. Troubleshooting and Validation
9. Defining Alerting and Recording Rules
10. Discovering and Creating Grafana Dashboards
11. Understanding and Extending Alertmanager
12. Choosing the Right Service Discovery
13. Scaling and Federating Prometheus
14. Integrating Long-Term Storage with Prometheus

Joel Bastos is an open source supporter and contributor, with a background in infrastructure security and automation. He is always striving for the standardization of processes, code maintainability, and code reusability. He has defined, led, and implemented critical, highly available, and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale infrastructures in several organizations, with Prometheus as the cornerstone. He has worked at two unicorn companies in Portugal and at one of the largest transaction-oriented gaming companies in the world. Previously, he has supported several governmental entities with projects such as the Public Key Infrastructure for the Portuguese citizen card. You can find his blogs at kintoandar and on Twitter with the handle @kintoandar.

Pedro Araújo is a site reliability and automation engineer and has defined and implemented several standards for monitoring at scale. His contributions have been fundamental in connecting development teams to infrastructure. He is highly knowledgeable about infrastructure, but his passion is in the automation and management of large-scale, highly-transactional systems. Pedro has contributed to several open source projects, such as Riemann, OpenTSDB, Sensu, Prometheus, and Thanos. You can find him on Twitter with the handle @phcrva.