Prometheus: Up & Running

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Prometheus

In this chapter you will set up and run Prometheus, the Node exporter, and the Alertmanager. This simple example will monitor a single machine and give you a small taste of what a full Prometheus deployment looks like. Later chapters will look at each aspect of this setup in detail.

This chapter requires a machine running any reasonable, modern version of Linux. Either bare metal or a virtual machine will do. You will use the command line and access services on the machine using a web browser. For simplicity I will assume that everything is running on localhost; if this is not the case, adjust the URLs as appropriate.

Tip

A basic setup similar to the one used in this chapter is publicly available at http://demo.robustperception.io/.

Running Prometheus

Prebuilt versions of Prometheus and other components are available from the Prometheus website at https://prometheus.io/download/. Go to that page and download the latest version of Prometheus for the Linux OS with Arch amd64; the download page will look something like Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Part of the Prometheus download page. The Linux/amd64 version is in the middle.

Here I am using Prometheus 2.2.1, so prometheus-2.2.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz is the filename.

Stability Guarantees

Prometheus upgrades are intended to be safe between minor versions, such as from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1, 2.1.0, or ...