PROMETHEUS AND GRAFANA

A robust performance monitoring and alerting stack is crucial to service reliability. Cloud Native Computing Foundation-graduated Prometheus is one of the most popular and powerful monitoring frameworks for cloud-native projects. It offers its own time-series database to store metrics, supports a variety of exporters for monitoring services like MySQL, Kubernetes, and Kafka, and includes granular and flexible alerting.

While Prometheus is an excellent performance monitoring tool, its data visualization capabilities are limited. Therefore, teams often combine Prometheus with Grafana. Grafana is an open source metrics analytics tool from Grafana Labs, creators of Grafana Cloud, that works with multiple data sources, including the Prometheus time-series database.

The Prometheus Grafana combination has become one of the most popular solutions for performance monitoring, alerting, and visualization in the cloud-native space. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the Prometheus Grafana solution, and how it works, and walk through real-world examples to help you gain hands-on experience with these powerful DevOps tools.

Prometheus

Prometheus is like a smart thermometer for your computer systems.

• What It Does:
• It keeps track of how things are running on your servers and applications.
• It collects data about various things, like how much memory your computer is using or how fast a web page is loading.
• It stores this information over time, so you can see how things have changed.
• How It Works:
• It checks the status of your systems regularly, like a doctor checking your pulse and temperature.
• If something goes wrong, it can alert you so you can fix it before it becomes a big problem.

Grafana

Grafana is like a dashboard in a car, but for your computer systems.

• What It Does:
• It displays the data collected by Prometheus in a way that's easy to understand.
• You can create charts and graphs to see how your systems are doing at a glance.
• How It Works:
• It takes the numbers and data from Prometheus and turns them into visual displays, like speedometers and fuel gauges in a car.
• You can customize what you see to focus on the most important information.

Together

When used together, Prometheus and Grafana help you monitor and understand what’s happening with your computer systems. Prometheus collects the data, and Grafana shows it to you in an easy-to-read format, helping you ensure everything runs smoothly and fix problems quickly if they arise.