Prometheus is a free and open-source tool.It is designed to collect, store, and analyze time-series data, primarily for infrastructure and application monitoring.Use cases are logging and analyzing server CPU, memory, disk usage, tracking system and application performance metrics and so on.Mostly integration with Grafana for visualization.
Why should we use prometheus?
Prometheus is a powerful, open-source monitoring and alerting system designed for reliability, scalability, and flexibility. It is widely used in cloud-native environments, especially for monitoring microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure components.
Key Reasons to Use Prometheus
1. Metrics-Based Monitoring (Pull Model)
Unlike traditional log-based monitoring tools, Prometheus focuses on metrics collection using a pull-based model.
- It scrapes metrics from targets (like servers, applications, databases) at regular intervals.
- It uses HTTP endpoints (/metrics) exposed by services to collect real-time performance data.
2. Highly Scalable & Cloud-Native
- Designed for dynamic, containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes).
- Works well with microservices architecture.
- Supports service discovery to automatically detect new instances (e.g., Kubernetes pods).
3. Powerful Query Language (PromQL)
Prometheus uses PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) to analyze and aggregate time-series data.PromQL allows for real-time analysis and supports functions like rate, increase, histogram, and aggregation.
4. Event-Driven Alerting
Prometheus comes with Alertmanager, which helps send alerts via:
- Slack and more
What is grafana?
Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring platform that allows users to create interactive and customizable dashboards. It is commonly used with Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and other data sources to analyze metrics, logs, and traces.
Today I gonna show you how to test URL by using with prometheus and grafana. The following github link is that you can test with simple step.Before you do it, you must need preinstalled Docker and Docker Compose in your testing environment.You can use docker official website to install.