In a previous post I provided you with some techniques to help you monitor your Containerized Sitecore instance using native tools. Over the next few posts, I will show some of the common tools and techniques used for monitoring applications running in containers. When I initially started thinking about this I considered using InfluxDB as my time series DB to store the performance metrics and Grafana for visualizing and alerting. As both of these were already in my tool-set for load testing. However, the more I dug into monitoring container performance I quickly realized, Prometheus has established itself as the leading tool in this space and Docker also provides support for Prometheus – more on that later. So let’s start with an introduction to Prometheus and lay some foundations for a monitoring platform.
What is Prometheus?
Prometheus is an open-source application for monitoring systems and generating alerts. It can monitor almost anything, from servers to applications, databases, or even a single process. Prometheus monitors your defined targets by scraping metric data in a simple text format that is exposed by the target. Prometheus stores this metric data in a multi-dimensional data model by metric name and key/value in its timeseries database which can then be queried and retrieved using its own query language PromQL, in a nutshell.
Let’s take a quick look at the the main components and architecture that comprise of the Prometheus platform.
Lets backup for those of you that may not be familiar with some of these terms:
