Users are sometimes surprised that Prometheus uses RAM, let's look at that.
Reliable Insights
A blog on monitoring, scale and operational Sanity
On a regular basis a potential Prometheus user says they need a different architecture to make things reliable or scalable. Let's look at that.
There's various ways Prometheus federation can be used. To ensure your monitoring is scalable and reliable, let's look at how to best use it.
Another not uncommon question we get about Prometheus is as to why we don't have a single per-machine agent that handles all the collection, and instead have one exporter per application. Doesn't that make it harder to manage?
When starting out it's easy to think that you need Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices, Continuous Deployment and all the other trending topics on Hacker News/Reddit/Lobsters. What do you really need?
This week Microsoft removed unlimited storage from their OneDrive offering, because surprise surprise people were using it as unlimited storage. Does your product have features that cost you time and money, without your users paying accordingly?
Your service's traffic is steadily growing, latency has increased a bit but it's within reason. One day you launch a new customer and the latency jumps through the roof causing an outage. What happened? You hit the knee.
I enjoy cooking and regularly make scrumptious meals for myself. Does this mean that I'm capable of running a busy kitchen? Of course not! So why assume that all software engineers can automatically run production services?
It's common to think of monitoring as something just to alert you when things are going wrong. At Robust Perception we believe in Inclusive Monitoring, where all aspects of systems are monitored and available to provide insight and drive decisions.
Just after you've launched is not the best time to find out that you can't handle the load you predicted, or that running costs are much higher than you'd like. By estimating the operational parameters of your system as you design you can gain confidence that the system will work as you expect.
