How to Install and Use Prometheus: A Deep Dive into the Open Source Monitoring and Alerting Tool

Saturday, Jan 11, 2025 | 8 minute read

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Open-source monitoring solution offers real-time metrics collection, flexible data queries, and intelligent alerting. Its multidimensional data model and independent server nodes ensure scalability and reliability, making it an essential tool for developers and engineers. 🚀📊

“The future of monitoring systems belongs to openness and flexibility.” 🌌

In this data-driven era, the monitoring needs of enterprises and developers are becoming increasingly complex. The ability to track system performance in real-time and quickly receive fault alerts has become indispensable! Against this backdrop, Prometheus, a leading open source monitoring solution, is rapidly gaining prominence and is worth exploring in depth! ✨

Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool designed specifically for time-series data. It employs a multidimensional data model with flexible and efficient data collection and querying abilities. With Prometheus, you can obtain various metrics about your systems and services in real-time, allowing for intelligent alerting based on these metrics to help your team respond quickly to potential issues! 🌟

1. Unveiling Prometheus: What Exactly Is It? 🔍

Prometheus is an outstanding open source monitoring and alerting tool specifically used for monitoring systems and services. 🌍 It collects metrics at specified intervals from configured targets, evaluates rule expressions, and triggers alerts based on defined conditions. 🔔 This tool is designed to help developers and operations engineers understand the performance and operational status of systems in real-time, making system management more efficient!

2. Beyond Ordinary Monitoring: The Unique Charm of Prometheus 🌟

• Multidimensional Data Model: Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model that combines metric names with a set of key-value pairs to specify time series, enhancing flexibility and scalability of data. 📈
• PromQL Query Language: Prometheus offers a powerful PromQL query language, allowing users to perform complex operations on collected time series data and easily generate charts, tables, and alerts. 📊
• Independent Server Nodes: Each Prometheus server operates independently, using an HTTP pull model for data collection, eliminating the hassle of distributed storage, which ensures the reliability and independence of the servers. 🖥️
• Service Discovery: Prometheus can automatically identify monitoring targets, simplifying monitoring management through self-discovery or static configuration, enabling you to easily handle complex environments. 🛠️
• Graphical Visualization: Its built-in expression browser can connect with graphical tools like Grafana, providing various visualization options to help users intuitively view monitoring data. 📉
• Federation Feature: Support for layered and horizontal federation enhances monitoring capabilities, catering to various scale needs. 🌐

3. The Developer’s Choice: Why Choose Prometheus? 💡

• Open Source Feature: Prometheus is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing users to easily integrate with various applications and services. 🔓
• Community Support: Supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Prometheus boasts an active community where users can participate in discussions and receive support via Slack, IRC, and Discourse forums. 🤝
• Developer Trust: Over time, Prometheus has become a popular choice in monitoring solutions, with many developers and system administrators placing high trust in its features and support. 💪
• Installation Flexibility: Users can install Prometheus through multiple methods, from precompiled binaries to Docker images and source builds, choosing the method that best fits their needs. 🛠️

With its powerful features and flexibility, Prometheus enjoys widespread popularity across enterprises of all sizes, providing a stable monitoring solution! For developers and operations engineers, Prometheus is an indispensable partner that makes system performance monitoring simple and efficient! ✨

4. Installing Prometheus 🚀

4.1 Precompiled Binaries 💾

To get started with Prometheus, the easiest way is to download the precompiled binaries from the official prometheus.io website. This method is particularly suitable for beginners or those looking to get up and running quickly! After downloading, simply unzip the file and run the executable in the command line to easily start Prometheus! 🎉

4.2 Docker Images 🚢

If you are familiar with Docker, starting Prometheus becomes incredibly easy. Just execute the following command in your command line:

docker run --name prometheus -d -p 127.0.0.1:9090:9090 prom/prometheus

Here’s a breakdown of the command:

• --name prometheus: Sets the container name to “prometheus”.
• -d: Runs the container in the background.
• -p 127.0.0.1:9090:9090: Maps port 9090 of the host to port 9090 of the container, allowing you to easily access Prometheus via http://localhost:9090! 🌍

4.3 Building from Source ⚙️

For those looking to customize deeply, building Prometheus from the source is also a good option. First, ensure that Go and NodeJS are installed in your environment. Then execute the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus.git
cd prometheus

Here, you will clone the source code of Prometheus for local processing. Next, run the following commands to install Prometheus and Promtool:

GO111MODULE=on go install github.com/prometheus/prometheus/cmd/...
prometheus --config.file=your_config.yml

• GO111MODULE=on: Enables Go module support.
• prometheus --config.file=your_config.yml: Starts Prometheus with the specified configuration file.

Note: Before running Prometheus, ensure that the web/ui/static and web/ui/templates directories exist, as they contain the UI resources for Prometheus. The command make build can also compile all necessary web resources, creating the final executable! 🚀

5. Using Prometheus as a Go Library 📚

If you want to leverage the powerful features of Prometheus in a Go application, you can easily install the required packages using the go get command. For example, to use the Remote Write protocol, execute the following command:

go get buf.build/gen/go/prometheus/prometheus/protocolbuffers/go@latest

👈 This is an experimental feature, so proceed with caution when using it in your project!

5.1 Getting a Specific Version of Prometheus 📦

The version numbers of Prometheus may not perfectly align with Go module releases. To fetch a specific version of the library, use the following command:

go get github.com/prometheus/prometheus@v0.300.0

This way, you can ensure that your dependencies remain consistent with your project needs, avoiding potential breaking changes. Making your programming journey smoother! 👍

6. Alerts and Monitoring ⚠️

Prometheus supports flexible alert configuration, allowing users to specify the conditions that trigger alerts. These alerts are sent to the Alertmanager, which meticulously handles various notification mechanisms, like Slack, email, and more!

When configuring alerts, you can utilize Prometheus’s PromQL query language to define conditions and trigger logic, making your monitoring system both flexible and powerful! 🔥

7. Example Code 🖥️

Below is an example of a metrics query with label filtering, which shows the duration of each Go garbage collection cycle:

# A metric with label filtering
go_gc_duration_seconds{instance="localhost:9090", job="alertmanager"}

In this code snippet, go_gc_duration_seconds is the metric name, and {instance="localhost:9090", job="alertmanager"} is the label used to group the metric.

Additionally, you can use aggregation operators to calculate the difference between memory limits and usage:

# Aggregation operators
sum by (app, proc) (
  instance_memory_limit_bytes - instance_memory_usage_bytes
) / 1024 / 1024

Here, sum by (app, proc) indicates that the results are grouped by application and process, summing them up for more efficient data analysis. ✨

8. Starting Prometheus Using Docker 🔧

Let’s continue discussing Docker, which is another convenient way to quickly start Prometheus. Just run the following command in your command line to efficiently launch a Prometheus instance:

docker run -p 9090:9090 prom/prometheus

The key point here is: with the sample configuration in use, you will be able to access Prometheus’s Web UI on port 9090, making it easy to get started! 💪

8.1 Setting Command Line Parameters ⚙️

When the Docker image starts, some default parameters are set, but you can override these to add additional parameters as needed. For example:

docker run -p 9090:9090 prom/prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

If you want to supply your own configuration, this can be achieved through bind mounts. Here are two examples:

docker run \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -v /path/to/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    prom/prometheus

Or bind mount the directory containing your prometheus.yml to /etc/prometheus:

docker run \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -v /path/to/config:/etc/prometheus \
    prom/prometheus

Give it a try! 🎉

9. Preserving Your Prometheus Data 💾

To ensure your Prometheus data is safely preserved, you should adopt a persistence solution. One straightforward method is to create a Docker volume and bind mount it to the Prometheus data directory. Here’s how to do it:

# Create persistent volume for your data
docker volume create prometheus-data

# Start Prometheus container
docker run \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -v /path/to/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    -v prometheus-data:/prometheus \
    prom/prometheus

This way, your data will be saved and not lost every time the container restarts! Ensuring data security is wonderful, isn’t it? ❤️

10. Custom Images 🏗️

Of course, you can also create a custom image that embeds the configuration file for seamless migration across different environments. First, create a directory and add a Dockerfile with the following content:

FROM prom/prometheus
ADD prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/

The commands to build and run your custom image are as follows:

docker build -t my-prometheus .
docker run -p 9090:9090 my-prometheus

Make your image personalized and configure it however you like! 🚀

11. Using Configuration Management Systems 🛠️

If you prefer to use configuration management systems, you may want to consider the following third-party projects:

• Ansible: prometheus-community/ansible
• Chef: rayrod2030/chef-prometheus
• Puppet: puppet/prometheus
• SaltStack: saltstack-formulas/prometheus-formula

These tools make managing and configuring Prometheus much simpler and more efficient—definitely worth having in your toolkit! 🚀

12. Prometheus Community 🤝

Prometheus is an active open source project with a rich community for support. Join us through the following channels:

• Slack: Join discussions in the #prometheus channel on CNCF Slack.
• IRC: Chat at the #prometheus channel on irc.libera.chat.
• Matrix: Participate in discussions at #prometheus:matrix.org.
• Mailing Lists: Join the prometheus-announce and prometheus-users mailing lists to stay updated.

By engaging with the community, you not only stay informed but can also interact and exchange ideas with other users, enhancing your understanding of Prometheus and excelling in your endeavors! 💪🌈

Get started with installing and using Prometheus, and begin your monitoring journey today! ✨