6 Things to consider in a Prometheus monitoring platform

Organizations increasingly adopt Prometheus for monitoring container and microservice environments, particularly as they shift from monolithic architectures to cloud-native ones, but face scalability challenges as their infrastructure grows. The complexity of monitoring in such dynamic environments is heightened by the ephemeral nature of containers and the numerous metrics that need to be tracked across distributed systems. Prometheus, an open-source tool supported by a broad community, offers a solution with its ability to collect and make sense of metrics in these environments but can hit limitations as the environment expands. Challenges include managing multiple Prometheus servers and federating data, which can complicate troubleshooting and data integration. To address these issues, companies might consider using tools like Cortex or Thanos for centralized data querying, though these require significant resources. When transitioning to a commercial solution, it's crucial to maintain compatibility with existing Prometheus tools and features, such as PromQL and Grafana, while ensuring robust access controls and troubleshooting capabilities. Meeting these criteria can help organizations integrate a commercial solution seamlessly into their existing Prometheus setups, preserving the benefits developers appreciate while solving scalability issues.