Rethinking monitoring with Prometheus
Channel: DebConf Videos
Date: 2017-12-03

by Martín Ferrari

At: DebConf15
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/312/rethinking-monitoring-with-prometheus/
https://debconf15.debconf.org/

This talk will introduce a new tool for the discerning sysadmin: Prometheus.

It will start with an overview of the challenges of packaging a Go application in Debian: the small number of packaged libraries, the very particular model of dependency management and compilation, etc. It will be followed with an overview of the system and a taste of what you can do with it. If time permits, I might even do a small demo.

Most sysadmins face a similar problem: the state of FOSS monitoring tools is still stuck in the 90s. Nagios, Munin and friends get the job done, and you might think this is enough. But once you have a taste of what you can do with a tool like Prometheus, you will never want to come back!

Prometheus is a very different system. Instead of checking good/bad states of services, or just nicely graphing values, it collects information. A lot of information! At its core, it is just a time-series database and data collector. What makes it powerful is the advanced calculations you can make on the fly with the collected data, from which you can derive nice graphs, fire alerts, or just store for future analysis.

Room: Heidelberg
Scheduled start: 2015-08-20 11:00:00