From the course: Prometheus Essential Training

Overview of monitoring and observability - Prometheus Tutorial

From the course: Prometheus Essential Training

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Overview of monitoring and observability

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- [Instructor] Hi there, welcome on this journey into the depths of monitoring with Prometheus. Before we proceed, we need to take a step back to understand the fundamentals of what makes Prometheus such a valuable tool, monitoring and observability. But what exactly is monitoring and observability? And why is it so vital? Today, we are in the era of distributed systems and new realms of complexity every day. We need accurate ways to understand how our systems work. Imagine you are running a complex software application. In this age, it is no longer just a single program. It is distributed across countless servers, databases, and microservices. When something inevitably goes wrong, you need a notification, and then a way to understand what the problem is. This is where monitoring and observability come in. Monitoring is like having a magnifying glass to examine specific aspects of your system. It is about tracking predefined metrics, such as CPA usage and memory, to ensure that they are within acceptable bounds. Observability, on the other hand, is like having a wide-angle lens that captures the entire system's behavior. It's about understanding the why, and not just the what. Observability involves digging into the unknown, asking questions, and getting insights into how your system operates. These two terms are often misrepresented as being the same thing, but you should think of them as two sides of the same coin. There are three fundamental pillars of observability, logs, metrics, and traces. Logs are text records generated by the system to capture events. A common format for logging is in the JSON standard, which uses indexing to make the information searchable. Metrics are quantitative measurements that provide a high level overview of system performance. Metrics are a bedrock of monitoring, an important parts of using Prometheus. Traces provide a detailed view of how a request flows through a system. This is useful for debugging the life of a single request through a distributed system. In this course, we will focus on metrics as we discuss Prometheus. So, what is the role of Prometheus here? Prometheus is a powerful tool in the world of monitoring. As an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit, it excels at collecting metrics, recording time series data, and helping you understand what is happening within your complex systems. This reveals a large part of your monitoring and observability needs. So whether you're a seasoned professional, or just starting your journey into the world of monitoring and observability, Prometheus is your ally in this adventure.

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