What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution, originally developed by SoundCloud in 2012 and later integrated into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, known for its efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in collecting and storing metrics data in a time-series database. It operates on a pull-based model, scraping data from instrumented applications, services, and infrastructure components, and employs PromQL, a powerful query language, to analyze this data. Prometheus supports multi-dimensional data models, alerting rules, and integrates with visualization tools like Grafana, making it popular for monitoring modern cloud-native architectures such as Kubernetes environments. While Prometheus excels at monitoring dynamic service-oriented architectures and hardware, it is not intended for long-term data storage or complete observability solutions, often requiring complementary tools like New Relic for extended data retention and automatic environment setup. Despite these limitations, Prometheus remains reliable due to its independent server operation and its ability to monitor a wide range of systems, from microservices to hardware and infrastructure, with the help of exporters for non-HTTP endpoint services.