observability-monitoring

Prometheus and Grafana work together to collect metrics and visualize them. Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets using exporters, stores time-series data, and Grafana queries that data to display dashboards. Start by configuring Prometheus with service discovery, then connect Grafana as a data source to create visualization dashboards.

Prometheus collects and stores metrics from targets. Alertmanager routes and manages alerts based on Prometheus rules. Exporters expose application and system metrics (Node, PostgreSQL, custom) that Prometheus scrapes. Together they form a complete monitoring pipeline from metric collection through alerting.

PromQL is Prometheus's query language for selecting and aggregating time-series data. Recording rules pre-compute expensive queries and store results as new metrics. Use PromQL in Grafana dashboards for visualization and in Alertmanager rules for triggering alerts based on metric thresholds.

Yes. Prometheus supports service discovery for dynamic environments, multi-cluster federation to scrape metrics across clusters, and label management to organize metrics by service, environment, and region. This scales observability across microservice architectures.

SLIs (Service Level Indicators) measure performance metrics like latency and availability. SLOs (Service Level Objectives) set targets for those metrics. Error budgets quantify how much degradation is acceptable. Prometheus and Grafana track these to ensure production systems meet reliability commitments.