Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting tookit

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that was designed for reliability and scalability. It is particularly popular in the world of cloud-native applications and is widely used for monitoring containerized environments, such as those orchestrated by Kubernetes. Prometheus collects and stores time-series data as metrics, which can be analyzed and visualized using tools like Grafana.

Prometheus can serve as the intermediary between the application pods and Grafana.

Here's an overview of its role:

1. Data Collection: Prometheus collects metrics from your application pods using a pull-based mechanism. It scrapes metrics data from instrumented endpoints (usually exposed through HTTP) at specified intervals. These endpoints are typically referred to as "exporters" and can either be built into the application or provided by third-party services. Prometheus supports a variety of data formats, with the most common being the Prometheus exposition format.
2. Data Storage: Prometheus stores the collected metrics as time-series data in its built-in time-series database (TSDB). Each data point in a time series consists of a timestamp, a metric name, and a value. Labels can be associated with each data point to provide additional context, enabling more sophisticated querying and aggregation.
3. Data Querying: Prometheus offers a powerful query language called PromQL (Prometheus Query Language), which allows you to perform complex queries on the stored metrics data. You can use PromQL to analyze the performance and health of your application pods, as well as to set up alerting rules.
4. Integration with Grafana: Grafana is a popular open-source analytics and visualization platform that can integrate with various data sources, including Prometheus. By connecting Prometheus to Grafana, you can visualize the collected metrics data in the form of interactive and customizable dashboards. Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for exploring and visualizing the metrics data, making it easier to monitor the performance and health of your application pods.