This repository contains the code snippets used in Observability with Prometheus and Grafana: A Step-by-Step Guide Practical Guide to Monitoring Cloud-Native Applications.
This guide is designed for anyone looking to master Prometheus and build a strong foundation in modern monitoring and observability. Observability with Prometheus and Grafana is designed for both beginners and experienced professionals. A basic understanding of monitoring concepts, Linux, and networking is helpful but not required. This guide provides practical insights, hands-on examples, and deep technical knowledge to help multiple audiences effectively monitor and optimize their infrastructure. Here are some of the roles that will benefit from this guide:
DevOps Engineers & SREs (Site Reliability Engineers)
If you’re responsible for designing, deploying, and maintaining the reliability, scalability, and performance of production systems, this guide will help you implement Prometheus effectively, optimize queries, set up alerting, and integrate it with tools like Alertmanager and Grafana.
Software Engineers & Developers
If you build applications and want to instrument your code for better visibility, this guide will walk you through Prometheus client libraries, metric types, and how to expose custom application metrics for debugging, performance tuning, and business insights.
System Administrators & IT Professionals
If you manage servers, containers, or cloud infrastructure, this guide will show you how to monitor Linux servers, Kubernetes clusters, and Docker containers using Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, kube-state-metrics, and more.
Data Engineers & Observability Teams
If you deal with large-scale data collection and analysis, this guide will help you understand Prometheus’ storage model, retention policies, remote storage options, and how to query and analyze time-series data efficiently.
Security Engineers & Compliance Teams
If you need to monitor security-related metrics, detect anomalies, and implement alerting strategies for compliance and incident response, this guide provides the tools and techniques you need to integrate Prometheus into your security workflows.
IT Leaders & Architects
If you’re designing an observability strategy for your organization, this guide will help you evaluate Prometheus’ scalability, high availability options, and best practices for large-scale monitoring.
Students & Enthusiasts
If you’re learning about monitoring, observability, or cloud-native architectures, this guide will provide you with a structured, hands-on approach to mastering Prometheus.
No matter your background, if you want to level up your monitoring skills and build a robust, modern, and production-ready observability stack, this guide is for you.
This guide is designed to take you from a beginner to an advanced user of Prometheus. It covers both fundamental concepts and deep technical insights. By the time you complete this guide, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Prometheus and its ecosystem and the confidence to implement Prometheus in your own environments and make your teams more productive and informed.
Here’s a quick overview of what you will learn:
Getting Started with Prometheus
Discover what Prometheus is, its origins, and why it has become the de facto standard for monitoring cloud-native applications.
The Internal Design of Prometheus
Head chunking, compaction, write-ahead log, blocks, and more concepts that make Prometheus a powerful monitoring tool are explained in detail. The way Prometheus stores and queries data is key to understanding how to use it at scale.
Prometheus Architecture and Core Concepts
Gain a deep understanding of Prometheus' pull-based model, time-series database, data collection mechanisms, service discovery, and storage strategies.
Installing and Configuring Prometheus
Follow a hands-on, step-by-step guide to installing Prometheus, configuring it to scrape metrics, and setting up a robust monitoring environment.
Exploring the Prometheus Web Interface
Learn how to effectively navigate the Prometheus UI, query collected data using PromQL, and understand the status of targets, TSDB, and alerting rules.
Exploring and Querying Metrics with PromQL (Prometheus Query Language)
Dive deep into PromQL with practical examples, from basic queries to advanced functions like rate calculations, aggregations, and mathematical transformations.
Relabeling and Advanced Configuration
Master the art of relabeling, configuring service discovery, and advanced configuration options to make Prometheus as flexible as it can be. Use these techniques to monitor complex environments and make your monitoring experience adaptive and efficient.
Building Dynamic Dashboards with Grafana
Understand and implement dynamic dashboards in Grafana to create interactive visualizations and explore data across different dimensions.
Visualizing Metrics with Grafana
Import intuitive and powerful dashboards using Grafana to visualize Prometheus metrics and gain actionable insights. Build on the open-source community dashboards and extend them to meet your specific needs.
*Monitoring nix Systems (Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, etc.) with Node Exporter
Collect system-level metrics like CPU, memory, disk usage, and network statistics using the Node Exporter.
Monitoring External Services with Blackbox Exporter
Probe endpoints over HTTP, TCP, DNS, and ICMP to monitor availability and response times using the Blackbox Exporter.
Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus
Deploy Prometheus and kube-prometheus-stack using Helm, scrape Kubernetes endpoints, and collect cluster-wide metrics with kube-state-metrics and other integrations.
Monitoring Docker and Containerized Workloads
Track container resource usage, running instances, and performance metrics by using cAdvisor, Docker Engine metrics, and Prometheus-native monitoring tools.
Custom Exporters for Non-Native Integrations
Learn how to create and deploy custom exporters for applications and services that don’t natively expose Prometheus metrics.
Handling High Cardinality and Label Best Practices
Strategies for managing high-cardinality metrics and designing efficient labels for scalable monitoring.
Prometheus Service Discovery
Learn how Prometheus automatically discovers targets using mechanisms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and file-based discovery.
Code Instrumentation and Custom Metrics
Learn how to shift-left monitoring, instrument your applications with Prometheus client libraries, and expose custom metrics to Prometheus.
Understanding Prometheus Metric Types
Deep dive into counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries—how they work and when to use each.
Setting Up Alerts with Alertmanager
Learn how to configure alerting rules, manage notifications, and integrate Alertmanager with tools like Slack, email, and others for real-time alerting.
Pushgateway for Short-Lived Jobs
Understand how to monitor batch jobs and ephemeral workloads that are not directly exposed to Prometheus using the Pushgateway.
Understand the Bottlenecks and Performance Tuning
Gain a practical understanding of the performance bottlenecks of Prometheus and how to easily identify and resolve them.
Debugging and Troubleshooting Prometheus
Learn the important techniques for diagnosing slow queries, missing metrics, and performance issues in Prometheus.
Retention Policies and Storage Management
Learn how to manage data retention, configure TSDB, and optimize disk usage for long-term efficiency.
Scaling and Long-Term Storage
Understand Prometheus’ limitations and how solutions like Thanos and Cortex can help with scaling and long-term storage. Master the advanced techniques of sharding, federation, remote write, and more.
Best Practices
Learn practical tips for fine-tuning Prometheus, optimizing its resource usage, avoiding high-cardinality pitfalls, implementing monitoring best practices, reducing alert fatigue, designing effective dashboards, and many other strategies to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.
Real-World Use Cases
Learn how operations and observability teams use Prometheus in production, monitor containers, Kubernetes clusters, and VMs, and integrate it with other tools like Alertmanager and Grafana.
This guide is packed with real-world examples, hands-on exercises, tips, code snippets, diagrams, and best practices—all designed to ensure you not only learn how to use Prometheus but also gain the skills to implement and scale it effectively in your own environments. To elevate your observability skills, this guide takes you beyond the basics and puts you on a practical learning path to shine a light on your applications and infrastructure.
Aymen El Amri is a software engineer, trainer, author, and entrepreneur. He has been awarded multiple times with prestigious awards for his work in the software engineering field. He is the founder of the FAUN Developer Community and author of multiple guides on software engineering. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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