
A beginner-friendly introduction to Prometheus - yolossn
https://github.com/yolossn/Prometheus-Basics
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yolossn
When I started out as a beginner understanding what are metrics, why is
Prometheus used was something difficult for me to understand . After spending
a lot of time and learning from the material out there I created something
that I wish I had when I started learning Prometheus.

PS: This is my first tutorial kind of material, open to feedback on how to
improve.

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therealmarv
I wonder if it should be used at all for beginners and smaller teams. I
thought it is something like the new industry standard but even to get it
running in production is not trivial and had the feeling this is something for
teams who are deeply committed to monitoring and developing their own metrics,
views and alarms.

My conclusion is the majority (or at least smaller teams) are maybe better
served with something like Datadog. It's cheaper as long as you don't have a
high number of machines. Speaking of that I'm still missing the easy middle
ground of monitoring which is modern, easy to use and works for a higher
number of machines (and even something like Docker Swarm).

~~~
throwaway50444
Prometheus scales down very poorly for small teams. Other monitoring systems
are effective in few hour of work and require installing only one component.

Prometheus requires a plethora of tools around it to achieve feature parity
and plenty of manual work to create dashboards, alerts and so on.

Not to mention the need for custom exporters for each application (!),
contrasted to agent-based platforms that have built in plugins and autodetect
what need to be monitored.

~~~
therealmarv
That's also my conclusion. I want something of the shelf which offers some
basic monitoring and working alarms to my email for small or tiny projects. I
guess it's also doable with Prometheus if you figured it out once and then
reuse the configs/templates then <\- not everybody has time (or man power) for
that though.

~~~
heliodor
The InfluxDB TICK suite is very user friendly, but still requires you to run
more than one thing.

Telegraf makes easy work of monitoring all kinds of things and has a built-in
StatsD server.

Chronograf has a nice GUI for browsing through your metrics and can GROUP-BY
and filter on a specific value with just a click or two.

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nikita2206
This doesn’t seem to touch the subject of Promgen (or other Prometheus
configuration management software that I’m not aware of). Configuring it via
yaml files, especially the alerts in alert manager and queries in the sql
exporter, requires more steps than I’d like to do. Any recommendations on how
to manage Prometheus configs? Especially having multiple Prometheus instances
where the master node scraps all the data from other nodes

~~~
s_dev
That seems like advanced usage and would be outside the scope of the blog
post.

Maybe ask over at
[https://reddit.com/r/PrometheusMonitoring](https://reddit.com/r/PrometheusMonitoring)

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enitihas
Are there any good push based monitoring alternative to Prometheus.

~~~
tpxl
InfluxDB as the storage, telegraf and statsD to send the metrics and grafana
as the frontend.

I was extremely happy with this setup, although influxdb is a bit lacking (it
doesn't allow summing up two metrics for example).

