Brian Brazil is the founder of Prometheus and a core developer who emphasizes the importance of monitoring for preventing business issues and gaining insights. Prometheus is a modern metrics monitoring system, featuring a time series database, query language, and a rich ecosystem of client libraries and exporters. The tool is widely adopted by companies like Cloudflare and Google, with a vibrant community and extensive resources available for users and developers.

1. Brian Brazil
Founder
Prometheus for
Monitoring Metrics

2. Who am I?
● One of the core developers of Prometheus
● Founder of Robust Perception
● Contributor to many open source projects
● Ex-Googler, after 7 years in the Dublin office

3. Why monitor?
● Know when things go wrong
○ To call in a human to prevent a business-level issue
● Be able to debug and gain insight
● Trending to see changes over time, and drive
technical/business decisions
● To feed into other systems/processes

4. Services have Internals

5. Monitor the Internals

6. Monitor as a Service, not as Machines

7. What is Prometheus?
Metrics monitoring system (not logs).
A time series database. A query language.
Client libraries. An Ecosystem.
A modern approach to monitoring services.

8. Architecture

9. Client Libraries
Instrument your code to capture the metrics that
matter to you.
If upstream libraries are instrumented, you get that
for free!
Also many exporters, cAdvisor, MySQL, MongoDB,
SNMP, JMX, HAProxy, Minecraft, Factorio...

10. The PromQL Query Language
Arbitrary aggregation, joins and slicing all possible.
Can calculate how close you'll be to your quota in 4
hours, or the 95th percentile latency across an entire
datacenter.
If you can graph it, you can alert on it!

11. Analytics: Top 5 Docker images by CPU
topk(5,
sum by (image)(
rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total{
id=~"/system.slice/docker.*"}[5m]
)
)
)

12. Alert management
Not every alert results in a page.
Group similar alerts together, route them to the right
team and throttle notifications.
Designed to work reliably during network partitions.

13. Monitoring Approach
Service management went from manual to Chef to
Kubernetes. Need to do the same for monitoring.
Care about what matters to end users, such as
latency and error rates.
Distracting a human with alerts for everything that's
vaguely off only leads to burnout.

14. A Rich Community
Today there are 300+ contributors to the core
repositories, and 200+ 3rd party integrations.
There are 800+ subscribers on our mailing lists,
600+ people in IRC and an estimated 500+
companies using Prometheus in production.
Many companies funding Prometheus development.

15. Does Anyone I Know Use It?
You might have heard of a company called
"Percona"
The Percona Monitoring and Management tool is
based on Prometheus.
Also CloudFlare, Google, Digital Ocean, HBC, etc.

16. What is Prometheus?
Metrics monitoring system (not logs).
A time series database. A query language.
Client libraries. An Ecosystem.
A modern approach to monitoring services.

17. Resources
Official Project Website: prometheus.io
User Mailing List: prometheus-users@googlegroups.com
Dev Mailing List: prometheus-developers@googlegroups.com
IRC: #prometheus on chat.freenode.net
Robust Perception Blog: www.robustperception.io/blog