Prometheus and Grafana overview

As I said in the introduction, Prometheus focuses on doing a few things well, and it doesn’t provide rich charts or dashboards. Instead, it concentrates on collecting and storing metrics as time-series data and has a powerful, highly dimensional data model and query language.

Prometheus defines a simple text format that allows any application to expose metrics. Prometheus collects metrics from targets by scraping metrics from HTTP endpoints following the Prometheus-specified format. Since Prometheus exposes data in the same manner about itself and about the endpoints it consumes, it can also scrape and monitor its health or create a hierarchy of Prometheus systems to reduce the load on a single node and provide aggregated data. You can see an example of a Prometheus-compatible HTTP endpoint here:

# HELP http_requests A counter for the number of HTTP requests.
# TYPE http_requests counter
http_requests{method="put",code="200...