Learn how to effectively implement, manage, and optimize Prometheus for monitoring your systems

Key Features

• Achieve high availability with Prometheus by using Thanos
• Integrate Prometheus into your broader observability stack with OpenTelemetry
• Tweak, tune, and debug Prometheus to reliably scale without limits

Book Description

With an increased focus on observability and reliability, establishing a scalable and reliable monitoring environment is more important than ever. Over the last decade, Prometheus has emerged as the leading open-source, time-series based monitoring software catering to this demand. This book is your guide to scaling, operating, and extending Prometheus from small on-premises workloads to multi-cloud globally distributed workloads and everything in between.

Starting with an introduction to Prometheus and its role in observability, the book provides a walkthrough of its deployment. You'll explore Prometheus's query language and TSDB data model, followed by dynamic service discovery for monitoring targets and refining alerting through custom templates and formatting. The book then demonstrates horizontal scaling of Prometheus via sharding and federation, while equipping you with debugging techniques and strategies to fine-tune data ingestion. Advancing through the chapters, you'll manage Prometheus at scale through CI validations and templating with Jsonnet, and integrate Prometheus with other projects such as OpenTelemetry, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, and Mimir.

By the end of this book, you'll have practical knowledge of Prometheus and its ecosystem, which will help you discern when, why, and how to scale it to meet your ever-growing needs.

What you will learn

• Deploy Prometheus and Node Exporter to public clouds and Kubernetes
• Gain in-depth knowledge of how Prometheus's underlying code works
• Build your own custom service-discovery providers for Prometheus
• Debug Prometheus performance issues to identify cardinality issues in your environment
• Use VictoriaMetrics and/or Grafana Mimir for remote storage of Prometheus data
• Define and implement SLO-based alerting

Who this book is for

The book is for site reliability engineers (SREs), developers, and platform engineers involved in the monitoring and observability of their team or company's systems. A background in Prometheus is assumed, so the book dedicates minimal time to the basics of getting Prometheus up and running. Whether you aim to expand monitoring capabilities, streamline configuration management, or enhance integration with existing tools, this book will help you maximize the potential of your Prometheus monitoring stack.

Table of Contents

1. Observability, Monitoring, and Prometheus
2. Deploying Prometheus
3. The Prometheus Data Model and PromQL
4. Using Service Discovery
5. Effective Alerting with Prometheus
6. Advancing Prometheus: Sharding, Federation, and HA
7. Optimizing and Debugging Prometheus
8. Enabling Systems Monitoring with the Node Exporter
9. Utilizing Remote Storage Systems with Prometheus
10. Extending Prometheus Globally with Thanos
11. Jsonnet and Monitoring Mixins
12. Utilizing Continuous Integration (CI) Pipelines with Prometheus
13. Defining and Alerting on SLOs
14. Integrating OpenTelemetry with Prometheus
15. Beyond Prometheus

About the Author

Will Hegedus has worked in tech for over a decade in a variety of roles, most recently in Site Reliability Engineering. After becoming the first SRE at Linode, an independent cloud provider, he came to Akamai Technologies by way of an acquisition.

Now, Will manages a team of SREs focused on building an internal observability platform for Akamai's Connected Cloud. His team's responsibilities include managing a global fleet of Prometheus servers ingesting millions of data points every second.

Will is an open-source advocate with contributions to Prometheus, Thanos, and other CNCF projects related to Kubernetes and observability. He lives in central Virginia with his wonderful wife, 4 kids, 3 cats, 2 dogs, and bearded dragon.