A modern, scalable monitoring system
Prometheus is an open source monitoring system with a very active developer and user community. The design has been inspired by Borgmon, Google's proprietary production monitoring system. Since it’s initiation in 2012, it’s been adopted by many companies.
While most monitoring systems focus on measuring the external behaviour of a system through health checks, Prometheus focusses on measures the internal state of a system by directly accessing the metrics that are exported by the software. Prometheus also makes it possible to configure your monitoring targets dynamically, making it a valuable tool for gaining insight into distributed setups such as software running on a Kubernetes cluster.
Prometheus is Apache 2.0-licensed and has a very strong user and development community. The number of people contributing to the project and it’s popularity continues to grow.
Prometheus is designed to tackle real problems in real production systems. It is written from the ground up, based on real use cases and experiences at SoundCloud.
The Prometheus project provides client libraries that allow you to export metrics in your software more easily.
Though development of Prometheus only started in 2012, its design builds on more than a decade of production experience.
Both Prometheus and Kubernetes are inspired by internal Google technologies. Prometheus has several key design influences that makes it the best, and most popular monitoring system for both the infrastructure and applications deployed on Kubernetes.
CNCF adopted Kubernetes as its first official project. In May 2016 they accepted Prometheus as their second hosted project.
While setting up Prometheus at Kumina, we developed several utilities for converting metrics provided by existing pieces of software to Prometheus’ format (so-called metrics exporters). Because we at Kumina want to give back to the open-source community as much as we can, we’ve published most of these on Kumina’s GitHub page. We are proud to say we are the biggest contributor in terms of exporters in the Netherlands by now.
Who else is using Prometheus
