Prometheus Fundamentals
Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects numeric measurements over time. You use it to inspect system behavior, query trends, and turn defined conditions into alerts.
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Don't Panic
Don't Panic - Prometheus Fundamentals
Prometheus Fundamentals centers on Prometheus. Prometheus answers a practical operations question: what is your system doing now, and how has that behavior changed? It collects numeric measurements called metrics.
Operate from the project's own resources and APIs. Learn how desired state becomes running state, which status conditions matter, and which dependencies (network, storage, identity, certificates) the control plane assumes.
Upgrades, backups, and credential rotation are part of the product, not optional aftercare. Version skew between clients and servers creates failures that look like application bugs. Pin versions and rehearse rollback.
Convenience features reduce boilerplate and widen blast radius. Enable them when you can observe and reverse the expanded surface. Defaults from quickstarts are starting points, not production policy.
Name owners for upgrades, credentials, and disaster recovery before traffic arrives. Unowned control-plane state becomes an outage with no clear pager. Prefer explicit version pins and tested rollback over floating tags that quietly change behavior between deploys.
Name owners for upgrades, credentials, and disaster recovery before traffic arrives. Unowned control-plane state becomes an outage with no clear pager. Prefer explicit version pins and tested rollback over floating tags that quietly change behavior between deploys.
Name owners for upgrades, credentials, and disaster recovery before traffic arrives. Unowned control-plane state becomes an outage with no clear pager. Prefer explicit version pins and tested rollback over floating tags that quietly change behavior between deploys.
Read the Intro for the mental model. Use the Cheatsheet when you need the resource map. Updates and Upstream track the Prometheus release line that changes these APIs.
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Sources
- https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/
Supports
- Prometheus purpose, architecture, pull model, components, use cases, and limits
- Standalone server design and unsuitability for exact per-request billing
- https://prometheus.io/docs/tutorials/getting_started/
Supports
- Basic configuration, self-scraping, Node Exporter, and initial learning sequence
- https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/data_model/
Supports
- Time-series identity, metric names, labels, samples, and reserved label conventions
- https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/metric_types/
Supports
- Counter, gauge, classic histogram, native histogram, and summary behavior
- Native histogram preference and histogram series structure
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/querying/basics/
Supports
- PromQL purpose, selectors, result types, instant queries, and range queries
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/querying/operators/
Supports
- PromQL aggregation and label retention behavior
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/querying/functions/
Supports
- Rate, histogram quantile, and time-series function behavior
- Applying rate before aggregation so counter resets are detected per series
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/
Supports
- Global, scrape, discovery, relabeling, and rule-file configuration fields
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/recording_rules/
Supports
- Recording and alerting rule structure, evaluation, precomputation, and promtool checks
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/alerting_rules/
Supports
- Alert states, waiting duration, labels, and annotations
- https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/latest/alertmanager/
Supports
- Alertmanager grouping, deduplication, routing, silences, and inhibition
- https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/
Supports
- Metric selection, labels, cardinality costs, counter rates, gauges, and missing metrics
- https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/naming/
Supports
- Metric naming, base units, counter suffixes, and bounded-label guidance
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage/
Supports
- Local storage boundaries, retention controls, remote write, and remote read
- https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
Supports
- Starting catalog used to discover topic-specific awesome lists
- https://github.com/warpnet/awesome-prometheus
Supports
- Discovery of Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, Prometheus Operator, monitoring mixins, Grafana, and Thanos
- https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/node-exporter/
Supports
- Node Exporter purpose, host metrics, scrape configuration, and learner workflow
- https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter
Supports
- Blackbox probing protocols, probe behavior, configuration, and multi-target pattern
- https://prometheus-operator.dev/docs/
Supports
- Kubernetes-native management, custom resources, installation, operation, and troubleshooting
- https://monitoring.mixins.dev/prometheus/
Supports
- Reusable Prometheus self-monitoring alerts and dashboards
- https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/prometheus/
Supports
- Built-in Prometheus data source, PromQL querying, visualization, and compatible backends
- https://thanos.io/tip/components/
Supports
- Thanos component map for global queries, high availability patterns, and object-storage-backed history