Prometheus

Visit prometheus.io for the full documentation, examples and guides.

Prometheus 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 if some condition is observed to be true.

Prometheus' main distinguishing features as compared to other monitoring systems are:

• a multi-dimensional data model (timeseries defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
• a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
• no dependency on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
• timeseries collection happens via a pull model over HTTP
• pushing timeseries is supported via an intermediary gateway
• targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
• multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support
• support for hierarchical and horizontal federation

Architecture overview

Using this container image

Running Prometheus on Docker is as simple as docker run -p 9090:9090 prom/prometheus. This starts Prometheus with a sample configuration and exposes it on port 9090.

The Prometheus image uses a volume to store the actual metrics. For production deployments it is highly recommended to use a named volume to ease managing the data on Prometheus upgrades.

To provide your own configuration, there are several options. Here are two examples.

Volumes & bind-mount

Bind-mount your prometheus.yml from the host by running:

docker run \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -v /path/to/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    prom/prometheus

Or bind-mount the directory containing prometheus.yml onto /etc/prometheus by running:

docker run \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -v /path/to/config:/etc/prometheus \
    prom/prometheus

Custom image

To avoid managing a file on the host and bind-mount it, the configuration can be baked into the image. This works well if the configuration itself is rather static and the same across all environments.

For this, create a new directory with a Prometheus configuration and a Dockerfile like this:

FROM prom/prometheus
ADD prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/

Now build and run it:

docker build -t my-prometheus .
docker run -p 9090:9090 my-prometheus

A more advanced option is to render the configuration dynamically on start with some tooling or even have a daemon update it periodically.

Contributing

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.