Prometheus

Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts when specified conditions are observed.

The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are:

• A multi-dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
• PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
• No dependency on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
• An HTTP pull model for time series collection
• Pushing time series is supported via an intermediary gateway for batch jobs
• Targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
• Multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support
• Support for hierarchical and horizontal federation

Architecture overview

Install

There are various ways to install Prometheus.

Precompiled binaries

Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the download section on prometheus.io. Using the latest production release binary is the recommended way to install Prometheus. See the Installing chapter in the documentation for all the details.

Docker images

Docker images are available on Quay.io or Docker Hub.

You can launch a Prometheus container for trying it out with

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

Prometheus will now be reachable at http://localhost:9090/.

Building from source

To build Prometheus from source code, you need:

• Go: Version specified in go.mod or greater.
• NodeJS: Version specified in .nvmrc or greater.
• npm: Version 10 or greater (check with npm --version and here).

Start by cloning the repository:

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

You can use the go tool to build and install the prometheus and promtool binaries into your GOPATH:

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

However, when using go install to build Prometheus, Prometheus will expect to be able to read its web assets from local filesystem directories under web/ui/static. In order for these assets to be found, you will have to run Prometheus from the root of the cloned repository. Note also that this directory does not include the React UI unless it has been built explicitly using make assets or make build.

An example of the above configuration file can be found here.

You can also build using make build, which will compile in the web assets so that Prometheus can be run from anywhere:

make build
./prometheus --config.file=your_config.yml

The Makefile provides several targets:

• build: build the prometheus and promtool binaries (includes building and compiling in web assets)
• test: run the tests
• test-short: run the short tests
• format: format the source code
• vet: check the source code for common errors
• assets: build the React UI

Service discovery plugins

Prometheus is bundled with many service discovery plugins. You can customize which service discoveries are included in your build using Go build tags.

To exclude service discoveries when building with make build, add the desired tags to the .promu.yml file under build.tags.all:

build:
    tags:
        all:
            - netgo
            - builtinassets
            - remove_all_sd           # Exclude all optional SDs
            - enable_kubernetes_sd    # Re-enable only kubernetes

Then run make build as usual. Alternatively, when using go build directly:

go build -tags "remove_all_sd,enable_kubernetes_sd" ./cmd/prometheus

Available build tags:

• remove_all_sd - Exclude all optional service discoveries (keeps file_sd, static_sd, and http_sd)
• enable_<name>_sd - Re-enable a specific SD when using remove_all_sd

If you add out-of-tree plugins, which we do not endorse at the moment, additional steps might be needed to adjust the go.mod and go.sum files. As always, be extra careful when loading third party code.

Building the Docker image

You can build a docker image locally with the following commands:

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