Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus: Implement and scale queries, dashboards, and alerting across machines and containers

by Joel Bastos, Pedro Araújo

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system. It provides a modern time series database, a robust query language, several metric visualization possibilities, and a reliable alerting solution for traditional and cloud-native infrastructure.

This book covers the fundamental concepts of monitoring and explores Prometheus architecture, its data model, and how metric aggregation works. Multiple test environments are included to help explore different configuration scenarios, such as the use of various exporters and integrations. You'll delve into PromQL, supported by several examples, and then apply that knowledge to alerting and recording rules, as well as how to test them. After that, alert routing with Alertmanager and creating visualizations with Grafana is thoroughly covered. In addition, this book covers several service discovery mechanisms and even provides an example of how to create your own. Finally, you'll learn about Prometheus federation, cross-sharding aggregation, and also long-term storage with the help of Thanos.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to implement and scale Prometheus as a full monitoring system on-premises, in cloud environments, in standalone instances, or using container orchestration with Kubernetes.

What you will learn:
• Grasp monitoring fundamentals and implement them using Prometheus
• Discover how to extract metrics from common infrastructure services
• Find out how to take full advantage of PromQL
• Design a highly available, resilient, and scalable Prometheus stack
• Explore the power of Kubernetes Prometheus Operator
• Understand concepts such as federation and cross-shard aggregation
• Unlock seamless global views and long-term retention in cloud-native apps with Thanos

430 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 31, 2019

About the author

Joel Bastos is an open source supporter and contributor, with a background in infrastructure security and automation. He is always striving for the standardization of processes, code maintainability, and code reusability.

He has defined, led, and implemented critical highly-available and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale infrastructures in several organizations, with Prometheus as the cornerstone. He has worked at two unicorn companies in Portugal and at one of the largest transaction-oriented gaming companies in the world. Previously, he has supported several governmental entities with projects such as the Public Key Infrastructure for the Portuguese citizen card.

Reviews

[Sofiazinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a crash course in modern monitoring using Prometheus as the underlying technology. Besides being very well organised and the writing very accessible, the practical examples are invaluable to make all the concepts clear and easy to follow. This makes quite simple to understand the implications of deploying a single Prometheus instance to a multi-datacenter fully available stack. The chapters regarding Thanos are incredibly useful to ensure long-term storage and global view approaches, for example. Lastly, this book has a whole very extensive chapter dedicated to PromQL, which IMHO makes it stand out from other books on this topic.

I recommend this book for professionals and beginners alike.

[Miguel David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well organized. Written in a way that anyone in tech can pick it up as it explains are the principles behind Prometheus and it’s ecosystem. Also good if you have some experience with Prometheus, but want to better understand promql, or thanos.