A short presentation of Prometheus given at the CodeU Automation Night meetup in Aarhus at November 1st 2016.

1. Prometheus
By Kasper Nissen
@phennex
Monitoring with

2. Hi!
My name is Kasper
@phennex

3. What am I going to cover?
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Monitoring - why and what?
Prometheus - an introduction
Short demo

4. DEMO Part 1
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https://github.com/kaspernissen/automation_night_demo

5. Why monitor?
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6. What to monitor?
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Analyzing long-term trends
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7. What to monitor?
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Comparing over time or experiment groups
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8. What to monitor?
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Alerting
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9. What to monitor?
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Building dashboards
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Conducting ad hoc retrospective analysis
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Purpose:
What is broken?
and why?

12. What to monitor?
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13. What to monitor?
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Hosts
CPU, Memory, I/O, Network, Filesystem
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14. What to monitor?
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Containers
CPU, Memory, I/O, Restarts, Throttling
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15. What to monitor?
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Applications
Throughput, Latency
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16. The Four Golden Signals
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Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems

17. What to monitor?
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Latency
The time it takes to service a request.
Important to distinguish between the latency of
successful and failed requests.
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18. What to monitor?
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Traffic
A measure of how much demand is being placed on your system,
measured in a high-level system-specific metric.
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19. What to monitor?
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Errors
The rate of requests that fail, either explicitly (e.g. HTTP 500s),
implicitly (HTTP 200 success with wrong content)
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20. What to monitor?
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Saturation
How “full” your service is. A measure of your system fraction,
emphasizing the resources that are most constrained
(e.g. in a memory-constrained system, show memory)
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21. Prometheus
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22. What to monitor?
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Prometheus
Prometheus was presented to be the protector and benefactor of mankind.
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23. Prometheus
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Heavily inspired by Borgmon
Built by ex-Googlers at SoundCloud
Pull-based (scrapes at regular intervals)
Many integration possibilities

24. The 2nd project in CNCF

25. What is Prometheus?
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Monitoring system and Timeseries Database
Instrumentation
Metrics collection and storage
Querying
Alerting
Dashboard / Graphing / Trending
Source: https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/prometheus-design-and-philosophy/

26. Prometheus focus on
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Operational systems monitoring
Dynamic cloud environments
Source: https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/prometheus-design-and-philosophy/

27. Prometheus does not do
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Raw log / event collection (use ELK stack)
Request tracing (use opentracing.io)
“Magic” anomaly detection
Durable long-term storage
Automatic horizontal scaling
User / auth management

28. Prometheus Architecture
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Long-lived jobs
Pushgateway AlertmanagerShort-lived jobs
Grafana

29. The Data model
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<metric name>{<label name>=<label value>, …}
api_http_requests_total{method="POST", handler="/messages"}
Notation:
Example:
Every time series is uniquely identified by its metric name and a set of key-
value pairs, also known as labels.

30. How to get metrics?
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Directly
instrumented
Not Directly
instrumented
Exporter
Source: https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/so-you-want-to-write-an-exporter/

31. @phennex

32. Directly instrumented software
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cAdvisor
Doorman
Etcd
Kubernetes-Mesos
Kubernetes
RobustIRC
SkyDNS
Weave Flux

33. Official Prometheus Exporters
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Node/system metrics exporter
AWS CloudWatch exporter
Blackbox exporter
Collectd exporter
Consul exporter
Graphite exporter
HAProxy exporter
InfluxDB exporter
JMX exporter
Memcached exporter
Mesos task exporter
MySQL server exporter
SNMP exporter
StatsD exporter

34. 3rd party exporters
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Databases
Aerospike exporter
ClickHouse exporter
CouchDB exporter
MongoDB exporter
PgBouncer exporter
PostgreSQL exporter
ProxySQL exporter
Redis exporter
RethinkDB exporter
SQL query result set metrics exporter

35. 3rd party exporters
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Hardware related
apcupsd exporter
IoT Edison exporter
IPMI exporter
knxd exporter
Ubiquiti UniFi exporter
Messaging systems
NATS exporter
NSQ exporter
RabbitMQ exporter
RabbitMQ Management Plugin exporter
Mirth Connect exporter

36. 3rd party exporters
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Storage
Ceph exporter
ScaleIO exporter
HTTP
Apache exporter
Nginx metric library
Passenger exporter
Varnish exporter
WebDriver exporter
APIs
Docker Hub exporter
GitHub exporter
OpenWeatherMap exporter
Rancher exporter
Speedtest.net exporter
Logging
Google's mtail log data extractor
Grok exporter
Other monitoring systems
Cloud Foundry Firehose exporter
scollector exporter
Heka dashboard exporter
Heka exporter
Munin exporter
New Relic exporter
Miscellaneous
BIG-IP exporter
BIND exporter
BOSH exporter
Jenkins exporter
Meteor JS web framework exporter
Minecraft exporter module
PowerDNS exporter
rTorrent exporter
SMTP/Maildir MDA blackbox prober
Xen exporter

37. PromQL
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Non-SQL Query Language
Better for metrics computation
Only does reads
Source: https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/prometheus-design-and-philosophy/

38. PromQL - Operators
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+ (addition) == (equal)
- (substraction) != (not-equal)
* (multiplication) > (greater-than)
/ (division) < (less-than)
% (modulo) >= (greater-or-equal)
^ (exponentiation) <= (less-or-equal)
and (intersection) or (union)
unless (complement)
… and vector matching
Source: https://prometheus.io

39. PromQL - Aggregation Operators
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sum stddev bottomk
min stdvar topk
max count quantile
avg count_values
Source: https://prometheus.io

40. PromQL - Examples
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rate(api_http_requests_total[5m])
errors{job=“foo”} / total{job=“foo”}
Source: https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/prometheus-design-and-philosophy/

41. DEMO Part 2
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https://github.com/kaspernissen/automation_night_demo

42. Alerting
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43. What to monitor?
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Symptom-based alerting
Be proactive
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44. What to monitor?
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Prevent alert fatigue
- Use ticketing systems (Avoid email spam)
- Warning are tasks like new features
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45. What to monitor?
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Provide runbooks
- Keep them concise
- Explanation, hints, links
- Dynamic - include recent observations
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46. What to monitor?
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Practice outages
“Firedrills”, “Gamedays” - repeat regularly
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48. @phennex
Start being proactive.
Dont be firefighters.

49. … and remember …
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50. Hope is NOT a strategy
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Source: Site Reliability Engineering, How Google Runs Production Systems (2016), B. Beyer et al.

51. If you wanna know more…
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- prometheus.io
- promcon.io
- The Site Reliability Engineering book
- Podcasts:
- https://dev.to/sedaily/prometheus-monitoring-with-brian-brazil
- https://dev.to/sedaily/the-art-of-monitoring-with-james-turnbull
(prefers push based opposite prometheus)
- https://dev.to/sedaily/prometheus-with-julius-volz

52. @phennex
The 3rd project in CNCF
opentracing.io

53. Thank you!
@phennex
kaspernissen@gmail.com
@phennex