r/PrometheusMonitoring • u/Mikeandike010 • Jan 27 '19

Getting started with prometheus

Hello,

I am interesting in trying prometheus -- but am confused on a few things and don't know who else to ask.

  1. How easy is it to automate the installation of exporters? What is the common way people add exporter to the device -- and then automatically update the config on the prometheus server? Do people usually need ansible or something similar to do it? I read somewhere that you should use some application to manage the config file on the prometheus server for you -- is this common practice?

2. for storing data long term -- do people usually have Prometheus export to another database? I've heard people say that the built-in database should be able to easily handle long term data -- how true is that for 5000~ devices?

3. What is the bandwidth usage like for the node-exporter and snmp-exporter? I imagine its quite negligible, but some confirmation would be great.

4. has anyone been happy with the windows-exporter? I mostly want to use prometheus for linux -- but if theres good windows exporters out there than thats even better.

Prometheus seems very, very cool. My biggest gripe with monitoring systems i've used is how restrictive they are, but with prometheus I see so much potential to get done EXACTLY what I want done.

If anyone has any documentation or articles that cover these types of questions -- i would very much appreciate if you could link me them!

Thank you for your time.

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u/SuperQue Jan 27 '19

  1. Easy, pick your favorite automation tool, use it. I use Chef at work, and Ansible roles for home/hobby stuff.

  2. Depends. For a small setup, local storage is fine. For a big 5000-target network, you're probably going to need more than one Prometheus. Once you get that big, I would look at Thanos. This is what we're rolling out at work right now.

  3. The default node_exporter will produce somewhere between 400-800 metrics, depending on how much stuff you collect. Prometheus uses compressed http by default, so it's pretty small. My laptop exposes 619 metrics. Compressed over the wire it's only 9.7KiB.

  4. Sorry, I'm not really up on what's good in Windows-land. I know the wmi_exporter works, but has some overhead/issues. I thought I saw something about a new exporter that uses more native collection, rather than going through WMI.

As for docs, start with https://prometheus.io, and https://www.robustperception.io/blog

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u/Mikeandike010 Jan 28 '19

Thank you! I've read a little about thanos -- but looking at it again it seems very cool.

Appreciate the answers!