Prometheus is designed for cloud-native environments. It pulls metrics by querying HTTP endpoints.
Pull vs push:
Traditional tools have agents push data. Prometheus pulls metrics from /metrics endpoints. This simplifies configuration.
Key concepts:
- Labels provide flexible dimensionality
- PromQL query language for analysis
- Alertmanager handles notification routing
Best for:
- Kubernetes and containerized workloads
- Microservices architectures
- Auto-scaling environments
Not ideal for:
- Traditional network devices without exporters
- Long-term storage requirements