Prometheus Configuration
Complete guide to Prometheus setup, metric collection, scrape configuration, and recording rules.
Purpose
Configure Prometheus for comprehensive metric collection, alerting, and monitoring of infrastructure and applications.
When to Use
- Set up Prometheus monitoring
- Configure metric scraping
- Create recording rules
- Design alert rules
- Implement service discovery
Detailed patterns and worked examples
Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.
Best Practices
- Use consistent naming for metrics (prefix_name_unit)
- Set appropriate scrape intervals (15-60s typical)
- Use recording rules for expensive queries
- Implement high availability (multiple Prometheus instances)
- Configure retention based on storage capacity
- Use relabeling for metric cleanup
- Monitor Prometheus itself
- Implement federation for large deployments
- Use Thanos/Cortex for long-term storage
- Document custom metrics
Troubleshooting
Check scrape targets:
curl http://localhost:9090/api/v1/targets
Check configuration:
curl http://localhost:9090/api/v1/status/config
Test query:
curl 'http://localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=up'
Related Skills
grafana-dashboards- For visualizationslo-implementation- For SLO monitoringdistributed-tracing- For request tracing