Prometheus is a powerful open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It was originally developed by SoundCloud in 2012, and eventually made available as open source software in 2015. Prometheus provides a simple yet comprehensive set of tools for operations teams to monitor the health of their systems, collect metrics from various sources, and trigger alerts when certain conditions are met.
At its core, Prometheus stores all collected metrics in a time series database that provides users with a query language for retrieving information from the database. This allows users to explore data points across multiple time frames as well as create complex queries for more detailed insights into their systems’ performance. Additionally, Prometheus allows users to set up alerting rules that get triggered when certain conditions are met - providing real-time notifications about potential issues or changes in system behavior.
Prometheus also provides a powerful API for developers to write applications that interact with the monitoring system. Additionally, it supports targets written in many different programming languages including Go, Java, Python and Ruby - allowing developers to integrate with existing applications without needing to learn new languages or frameworks. Furthermore, Prometheus supports various popular exporters such as MySQL, Redis and MongoDB - allowing it to easily collect metrics from these databases without having to write custom code or build custom integrations.
Overall, Prometheus is an incredibly powerful open source monitoring system that allows operations teams to gain insights into their systems quickly and accurately. Its various features make it easy to configure alerting rules as well as access data points programmatically through its API - providing users with the ability to detect anomalies and identify issues before they become critical problems.