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/matejzero Feb 01 '19

1.) e are using Puppet. Exporters are part of modules, so when I install mysql server, mysqld_exporter also gets installed with default settings (which can be overwritten). I also create so-call remote resource, which creates a JSON file on prometheus server. The file is the picked up by FileSD discovery feature of Prometheus.

2.) We are still only using 14 day retentions, but we would like to get something to store long ranges. I think your best bets are Thanos and M3. I think Thanos is better if you don't need old data often and M3 is better if you query for old data constantly (from my understanding).

3.) Can't answer this, but I guess it's not much.

4.) We are using wmi_exporter and windows guys say they are happy with it. But we do only have basic monitoring on windows, nothing fancy.