Observability with Prometheus and Grafana

What You Will Learn

This guide is designed to take you from a beginner to an advanced user of Prometheus. It covers both fundamental concepts and deep technical insights. By the time you complete this guide, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Prometheus and its ecosystem, and the confidence to implement Prometheus in your environments and make your teams more productive and informed.

Here’s a quick overview of what you will learn:

Getting Started with Prometheus:

Discover what Prometheus is, its origins, and why it has become the de facto standard for monitoring and metric-based observability.

The Internal Design of Prometheus:

Head, chunking, compaction, write-ahead log, blocks, and more concepts that make Prometheus a powerful monitoring tool are explained in detail. The way Prometheus stores and queries data is key to understanding how to use it at scale.

Prometheus Architecture and Core Concepts:

Gain a deep understanding of Prometheus' pull-based model, time-series database, data collection mechanisms, service discovery, and storage strategies.

Installing and Configuring Prometheus:

Follow a hands-on, step-by-step guide to installing Prometheus, configuring it to scrape metrics, and setting up a robust monitoring environment.

Exploring the Prometheus Web Interface:

Learn how to effectively navigate the Prometheus UI, query collected data using PromQL, and understand the status of targets, TSDB, and alerting rules.

Exploring and Querying Metrics with PromQL (Prometheus Query Language):

Dive deep into PromQL with practical examples, from basic queries to advanced functions like rate calculations, aggregations, and mathematical transformations.

Relabeling and Advanced Configuration:

Master the art of relabeling, configuring service discovery, and advanced configuration options to make Prometheus as flexible as possible. Use these techniques to monitor complex environments and make your monitoring experience adaptive and efficient.

Building Dynamic Dashboards with Grafana:

Understand and implement dynamic dashboards in Grafana to create interactive visualizations and explore data across different dimensions.

Visualizing Metrics with Grafana:

Import intuitive and powerful dashboards using Grafana to visualize Prometheus metrics and gain actionable insights. Build on the open-source community dashboards and extend them to meet your specific needs.

Monitoring *nix Systems (Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, etc.) with Node Exporter

Collect system-level metrics such as CPU, memory, disk usage, and network statistics using the Node Exporter.

Monitoring External Services with Blackbox Exporter:

Probe endpoints over HTTP, TCP, DNS, and ICMP to monitor availability and response times, using the Blackbox Exporter.

Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus:

Deploy Prometheus and kube-prometheus-stack using Helm, scrape Kubernetes endpoints, and collect cluster-wide metrics with kube-state-metrics and other integrations.

Monitoring Docker and Containerized Workloads