Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, 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 when specified conditions are observed.

The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are:

A multi-dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
No dependency on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
An HTTP pull model for time series collection
Pushing time series is supported via an intermediary gateway for batch jobs
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
download section
on prometheus.io. Using the latest production release binary
is the recommended way of installing Prometheus.
See the Installing
chapter in the documentation for all the details.

Docker images

Docker images are available on Quay.io or Docker Hub.

You can launch a Prometheus container for trying it out with

Prometheus will now be reachable at http://localhost:9090/.

Building from source

To build Prometheus from source code, You need:

Start by cloning the repository:

You can use the go tool to build and install the prometheus
and promtool binaries into your GOPATH:

However, when using go install to build Prometheus, Prometheus will expect to be able to
read its web assets from local filesystem directories under web/ui/static and
web/ui/templates. In order for these assets to be found, you will have to run Prometheus
from the root of the cloned repository. Note also that these directories do not include the
React UI unless it has been built explicitly using make assets or make build.

An example of the above configuration file can be found here.

You can also build using make build, which will compile in the web assets so that
Prometheus can be run from anywhere:

The Makefile provides several targets:

build: build the prometheus and promtool binaries (includes building and compiling in web assets)
test: run the tests
test-short: run the short tests
format: format the source code
vet: check the source code for common errors
assets: build the React UI

Service discovery plugins

Prometheus is bundled with many service discovery plugins.
When building Prometheus from source, you can edit the plugins.yml
file to disable some service discoveries. The file is a yaml-formatted list of go
import path that will be built into the Prometheus binary.

After you have changed the file, you
need to run make build again.

If you are using another method to compile Prometheus, make plugins will
generate the plugins file accordingly.

If you add out-of-tree plugins, which we do not endorse at the moment,
additional steps might be needed to adjust the go.mod and go.sum files. As
always, be extra careful when loading third party code.

Building the Docker image

The make docker target is designed for use in our CI system.
You can build a docker image locally with the following commands:

Using Prometheus as a Go Library

Remote Write

We are publishing our Remote Write protobuf independently at
buf.build.

You can use that as a library:

This is experimental.

Prometheus code base

In order to comply with go mod rules,
Prometheus release number do not exactly match Go module releases. For the
Prometheus v2.y.z releases, we are publishing equivalent v0.y.z tags.

Therefore, a user that would want to use Prometheus v2.35.0 as a library could do:

This solution makes it clear that we might break our internal Go APIs between
minor user-facing releases, as breaking changes are allowed in major version
zero.

React UI Development

For more information on building, running, and developing on the React-based UI, see the React app's README.md.

More information

Godoc documentation is available via pkg.go.dev. Due to peculiarities of Go Modules, v2.x.y will be displayed as v0.x.y.
See the Community page for how to reach the Prometheus developers and users on various communication channels.