Prometheus is an open source monitoring system inspired by Borgmon, Google's production monitoring system. Since it was introduced in 2012, the project has built up an active community and has already been used by many companies. It is an example of a TSDB, a time-series monitoring database. This means that time is a deliberate X-axis in all of your measurements. Every new entry is an insert and not an update of a data-row.
This is best visualized in a table:
| Time(x) | Key | Value |
| 12.01.33 | ping-latency | 0.234556 |
| 12.03.33 | ping-latency | 0.223344 |
The two main advantages of this approach are as follows:
- Scalability: These databases are tuned to ingest data and do so very efficiently.
- Usability: They provide all kinds of tools and functions, for example, data retention and continuous queries.
Whereas most monitoring systems focus on measuring external...
