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...