Prometheus

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

Install

There are various ways of installing Prometheus.

Precompiled binaries

Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the releases section of the GitHub repository. Using the latest production release binary is the recommended way of installing Prometheus.

Debian and RPM packages are being worked on.

Building from source

To build Prometheus from the source code yourself you need to have a working Go environment with version 1.5 or greater installed.

You can directly use the go tool to download and install the prometheus and promtool binaries into your GOPATH. We use Go 1.5's experimental vendoring feature, so you will also need to set the GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1 environment variable in this case:

$ GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1 go get github.com/prometheus/prometheus/cmd/...
$ prometheus -config.file=your_config.yml

You can also clone the repository yourself and build using make:

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/prometheus
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/prometheus
$ git clone https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus.git
$ cd prometheus
$ make build
$ ./prometheus -config.file=your_config.yml

The Makefile provides several targets:

• build: build the prometheus and promtool binaries
• test: run the tests
• format: format the source code
• vet: check the source code for common errors
• assets: rebuild the static assets
• docker: build a docker container for the current HEAD

More information

• The source code is periodically indexed: Prometheus Core.
• You will find a Travis CI configuration in .travis.yml.
• All of the core developers are accessible via the Prometheus Developers Mailinglist and the #prometheus channel on irc.freenode.net.

Contributing

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.