Why it matters

Prometheus is nearly universal in cloud-native infrastructure. Learning it applies to nearly any modern platform.

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The architecture

Targets: services expose /metrics HTTP endpoint. Prometheus scrapes on interval.

Storage: local TSDB. Retention typically 15 days.

Prometheus architectureTargets expose /metricspull modelPrometheus scrapesat intervalPromQL queriesand alertsAlertmanager separates alert deduplication + routing from Prometheus itself
Prometheus components.
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How it works end to end

PromQL: functional query language. rate(), sum(), by (label). Powerful; steep learning curve.

Alertmanager: separate service. Groups similar alerts, routes to Slack/PagerDuty/etc.

Long-term storage: Thanos, Cortex, VictoriaMetrics extend beyond local TSDB.

Exporters: adapt non-native systems (node_exporter for hosts, blackbox_exporter for probes).