Introduction to Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It has since become a widely adopted solution, graduating from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and is particularly renowned for its effectiveness in monitoring cloud-native environments like Kubernetes . Its core strength lies in its multi-dimensional data model, where time series data is identified by a metric name and key/value pairs (labels), enabling powerful filtering and aggregation .
The system primarily uses a pull model, scraping metrics from configured targets over HTTP, which simplifies instrumentation for many applications. For short-lived jobs, it supports a Pushgateway to receive metrics . Prometheus features a powerful and flexible query language called PromQL for querying and analyzing its time-series data . Alerts are defined using PromQL and are handled by a separate Alertmanager component, which manages notifications . While it can store data locally on a single server, Prometheus is designed for reliability and integrates with various visualization tools, with Grafana being a popular choice for building dashboards .
Key technical components and characteristics include:
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Prometheus Server: The central component for scraping, storing, and querying data.
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Exporters: Agents that expose metrics from third-party systems (e.g., hardware, databases) in a Prometheus-readable format.
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Client Libraries: Code libraries for instrumenting application code to expose custom metrics.
Grafana Introduction
Grafana is an open-source observability and analytics platform designed for large-scale monitoring and data visualization. It can display data through various visual dashboards, but it does not handle the data layer itself. Instead, it provides universal interfaces and relies on data from various sources. It seamlessly integrates with multiple databases, time-series databases, and cloud service data sources, transforming complex metric data into intuitive graphs, charts, and alerts through powerful dashboards. Whether for infrastructure monitoring, application performance analysis, or business data insights, Grafana offers a unified interface to help users gain real-time awareness of system status.
Currently, some COEX devices have integrated the Grafana platform based on the Prometheus database. This document primarily introduces how to use Grafana to monitor various metrics of COEX controllers.