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Mastering Prometheus
Mastering Prometheus

Mastering Prometheus: Gain expert tips to monitoring your infrastructure, applications, and services

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Mastering Prometheus

Observability, Monitoring, and Prometheus

Observability and monitoring are two words that are often used synonymously but carry important distinctions. While this book is not focused on academic definitions and theories surrounding observability, it’s still useful to distinguish between observability and monitoring because it will provide you with a framework to get in the right mindset when thinking about how Prometheus works and what problems it solves. A screw and a nail can both hang a picture, and you can bang a screw into a wall with a hammer, but that doesn’t make it the best tool for the job. Likewise, with Prometheus, I’ve seen many people fall into the trap of trying to use Prometheus to cover all of their observability and monitoring needs – when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Instead, let’s identify where Prometheus shines so that we can use it to its full effect throughout the rest of this book.

In this chapter, we...

A brief history of monitoring

In the beginning, there was Nagios… or, at least, so the story goes. Monitoring as we know it took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the introduction of tools such as Nagios, Cacti, and Zabbix. Sure, some things existed before that that focused on network monitoring such as Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) and its offshoot, rrdtool, but system monitoring – including servers – found its stride with Nagios. And it was good… for a time.

Nagios (and its ilk) served its purpose and – if your experience is anything like mine – it just won’t seem to go away. That’s because it does a simple job, and it does it fairly well. Let’s look a little closer at it, the philosophy it embodies, and where it differs from Prometheus.

Nagios

Early monitoring tools such as Nagios were check-based. You give it a script to run with some basic logic and it tells you whether things are good, bad...

Introduction to observability concepts

Observability both as a word and as a discipline is not unique to technology. The term is derived from control theory, which is traditionally more rooted in physical engineering disciplines such as robotics and nuclear engineering. It is, in essence, the ability to surmise the health of a system by observing its inputs and outputs. In nuclear engineering, you put in uranium and water, and you receive heat and steam. In software engineering, you put in an end user and an API call, and you receive a Jira ticket about how your API isn’t working. Err… well, hopefully not if your observability is doing its job.

Observability in systems engineering and software is primarily informed by and achieved with a handful of important telemetry signal types. You may have heard them referred to as “the three pillars of observability,” but that terminology has since fallen out of fashion as it elevates the act of gathering telemetry...

Prometheus’s role in observability

Prometheus is objectively pretty great at what it does, but can we make a system fully observable with just Prometheus? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is no. Prometheus’s strength is also its weakness – it’s singularly focused on one thing: metrics.

Prometheus is only focused on the metrics aspect of an observable system. It is purpose-built to efficiently store numeric time series of varying types in a simple format. To the extent to which it interoperates with other observability signals, it is only to provide a link or bridge to some other purpose-built system.

However, Prometheus also provides some of the highest-value data that you can collect. It’s likely your go-to data source in tools such as Grafana to visualize how your systems are performing. Logging and tracing systems can certainly provide more detailed data, but to get them to provide that same level of value in analyzing trends, you...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned the abridged history of monitoring and observability, what observability is, and how Prometheus contributes to observability through metrics. With this new (or refreshed) frame of mind, we can approach our utilization of Prometheus in a way that maximizes its usefulness without trying to use it as a silver bullet to solve all our problems.

In the next chapter, we’ll cover deploying a Prometheus environment that we’ll use as the foundation that we build upon throughout the remainder of this book.

Further reading

To learn more about the topics that were covered in this chapter, take a look at the following resources:

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Key benefits

  • 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
  • Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

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.

Who is this book 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.

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

Product Details

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Publication date : Apr 19, 2024
Length: 310 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781805125662
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Publication date : Apr 19, 2024
Length: 310 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781805125662
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

20 Chapters
Part 1: Fundamentals of Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 1: Observability, Monitoring, and Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 2: Deploying Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 3: The Prometheus Data Model and PromQL Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 4: Using Service Discovery Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 5: Effective Alerting with Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Part 2: Scaling Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 6: Advancing Prometheus: Sharding, Federation, and High Availability Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 7: Optimizing and Debugging Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 8: Enabling Systems Monitoring with the Node Exporter Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Part 3: Extending Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 9: Utilizing Remote Storage Systems with Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 10: Extending Prometheus Globally with Thanos Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 11: Jsonnet and Monitoring Mixins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 12: Utilizing Continuous Integration (CI) Pipelines with Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 13: Defining and Alerting on SLOs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 14: Integrating Prometheus with OpenTelemetry Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 15: Beyond Prometheus Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(6 Ratings)
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3 star 33.3%
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1 star 16.7%
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Will B. Jun 14, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book is excellent. It is the most comprehensive, practical guide on using Prometheus available. What differentiates this book from other similar materials is the emphasis on real world usage. Exploring supplementary tools like Pint and Sloth bring your Prometheus use to the next level. I've referenced this book multiple times already while working and have linked chapters to my peers. It is well written and worth a buy!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Roth Romano Jun 09, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Mastering Prometheus" by William Hegedus is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to elevate their observability and monitoring capabilities. The book offers a perfect blend of fundamental concepts and advanced techniques, making it essential for both beginners and seasoned professionals. Its practical examples and focus on scalability are particularly impressive, providing actionable insights for real-world applications. Highly recommended for enhancing your DevOps toolkit!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Mayank Jadhav Jun 16, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book is a perfect guide for those who want to take their Prometheus monitoring skills to the next level. It dives deep into operating, scaling, and extending Prometheus for various workloads, from small on-premise deployments to globally distributed cloud environments.To understand Prometheus in a better way, William has divided this book into three parts:1. Fundamentals of Prometheus - This part lays the groundwork by explaining observability and how Prometheus fits in. It then covers deployment, data model, query language (PromQL), service discovery, and alerting.2. Scaling Prometheus - Moving beyond basic setups, this part dives into horizontal scaling with sharding and federation. You'll also learn techniques for debugging performance issues and optimizing data ingestion.3. Extending Prometheus - This section explores integrating Prometheus with other tools and technologies. It covers remote storage options like VictoriaMetrics and Mimir, achieving high availability with Thanos, and utilizing OpenTelemetry for broader observability.If you're already comfortable with Prometheus basics and want to push your expertise further, this book offers advanced topics to take your monitoring capabilities to the next level.I was intrigued by few advanced concepts that were -1. Scaling Prometheus2. Optimizing and Debugging Prometheus3. Utilizing Remote Storage Systems with Prometheus4. Extending Prometheus Globally with Thanos5. Utilizing Continuous Integration (CI) Pipelines with Prometheus6. Integrating Prometheus with OpenTelemetryAs a DevOps Engineer, I can say that you will find this book valuable if you want to take your Prometheus skills to the next level and build robust monitoring solutions for demanding environments.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
N/A Nov 14, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
I purchased this eBook 2 days ago; it's over 300 printed pages of content. I spent about 2 hours with it over the weekend, but still have 93% of the content to read. That is, I have no idea what kind of rating to give to this material, but I'm already being prompted to review it. This book might be amazing! Or it might be awful! I don't know (yet)! My options are to review it now and (hopefully) stop the emails, or try to figure out how to unsubscribe (which I shouldn't have to do, and which isn't guaranteed to work), or I have to build a spam filter to block messages from feefo (which I shouldn't have to do, and maybe don't want to do, because maybe I want to come back and leave a legit review at some point). So I'm leaving this crappy 3-star review right now in hopes that the emails will stop and that maybe somebody somewhere will catch a clue: Wait a week, maybe 2 ~ 4 weeks, before pushing for feedback on a large volume like this.
Feefo Verified review Feefo
Amazon Customer Jul 30, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
Half of the book is things NOT Prometheus, all chosen examples are written in Go (not a big deal per se, python might have been more common..no stars reduced due to this though, just observation). Chose container tech is linode (exactly, why?!). For local setups, local testing, trying docker would have made much more sense. Linode market share is 2.6%, definitely not amongst most popular ones.I would have spent more time on PromQL , data collection, exporters, push proxies, how to handle, mitigate offline collection difficulties (yes, surprisingly network connection is not always available), or having mobile clients which are not continuously available, what measurement to take,ensure if big lump of metrics arrive late, instead of connecting to huge lump of exporters (hard coded), how to ensure exporters are available in widely dynamic networks. Lot of practical solutions stemming from real life monitoring dilemmas, just happy-path is considered.So half of book is not Prometheus, grand ignorance of real world issues, 2 stars off.Rest, it's pretty good, does go to depths of Prometheus, focuses on having it running and keeping it running, data compacting, scaling (alongside Kubernetes), templates, alerting, SLAs,SLOs.Worth the money still? Really depends on your needs, might be. I don't have another book to compare, I'm very familiar with large scale monitoring solutions with decades of experience, Prometheus itself was somewhat new to me. I consider the Prometheus part of the book worth compared to available online documentation.But I really was anticipating MASTERING prometheus, did fall short for afore mentioned reasons.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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