Build Systems that Drive Business
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

In-Person Training
Introduction to systems and service monitoring with Prometheus

Tamao Nakahara (Weaveworks), Ilya Dmitrichenko (Weaveworks), Stefan Prodan (Weaveworks)
9:00am–5:00pm Monday, June 11, 2018
1-Day Training Location: Almaden Ballroom 2 Level: Beginner

Platinum and Training passes do not include access to tutorials on Tuesday.

Prometheus—an open source monitoring system and time series database—features a multidimensional data model and a flexible query language and integrates monitoring aspects from client-side instrumentation to alerting. Tamao Nakahara, Ilya Dmitrichenko, and Stefan Prodan offer an overview of Prometheus architecture and concepts and walk you through using Prometheus and PromQL.

What you'll learn, and how you can apply it

By the end of this two-day training, you’ll be able to:

  • Install and configure Prometheus
  • Write your own Prometheus queries in PromQL
  • Integrate Prometheus with Kubernetes to discover and extract important metrics automatically (service discovery)
  • Create business- and user-focused metrics that help you and your colleagues make intelligent decisions

This training is for you because...

  • You're an app developer, DevOps engineer, or operations professional who wants to learn more about Prometheus.

Prerequisites:

  • Experience using Docker containers
  • Ability to create a basic web application in a language of your choice
  • Comfort using the terminal and command-line utilities
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes (useful but not required)

Hardware and/or installation requirements:

  • A WiFi-enabled laptop (Linux, macOS, or Windows) with Chrome installed

Monitoring containerized apps creates a whole new set of challenges that traditional monitoring systems struggle with. Prometheus—an open source monitoring system and time series database—features a multidimensional data model and a flexible query language and integrates monitoring aspects from client-side instrumentation to alerting.

Tamao Nakahara, Ilya Dmitrichenko, and Stefan Prodan offer an overview of Prometheus architecture and concepts and walk you through using Prometheus and PromQL. You’ll also learn how to use the open source Prometheus monitoring toolkit and integrate it with Kubernetes on an example application. You’ll leave able to use Prometheus to monitor your microservices on a Kubernetes cluster.

Outline

Monitoring microservices with Prometheus

  • An introduction to Prometheus monitoring
  • Prometheus philosophy and concepts: An overview of the different types of white-box/black-box monitoring, their pros and cons, Ladder, and why the Prometheus pull model is beneficial
  • Prometheus architecture
  • Good metrics to collect and why, constructing useful dashboards, what makes a good alert, how to get highly available, horizontally scalable Prometheus-aaS with open source Weave Cortex
  • RED method implementation
  • Alerts based on RED metrics and Go runtime metrics
  • Hands-on exercise: Using Prometheus to monitor a Kubernetes microservices application

PromQL, the Prometheus Query Language

  • The Prometheus data model and how PromQL can help you monitor your app in a dynamic system
  • PromQL operators
  • PromQL functions
  • Hands-on exercise: Building queries in PromQL
  • Hands-on exercise: Visualizing PromQL in Grafana
  • Prometheus alerts in PromQL
  • Hands-on exercise: Creating an alert in Prometheus with PromQL
  • Integrating with a Grafana dashboard
  • Webhook implementation for Alert Manager

About your instructors

Photo of Tamao Nakahara

Tamao Nakahara is head of developer experience at Weaveworks and co-organizes DevXCon. Tamao has over 20 years of DevEx, ecosystem alliances, and event experience. Previously, she was director of developer relations at New Relic, ran open source community programs at VMware and Pivotal for Cloud Foundry, Spring, Hadoop, RabbitMQ, and Redis, and helped customers with Oracle virtualization at VMware.

Twitter for mewzherder
Photo of Ilya Dmitrichenko

Ilya Dmitrichenko is a developer experience engineer at Weaveworks focused on making the adoption of microservices easier. Previously, Ilya worked at Xively, where he personally experienced the shift to a true DevOps culture. He began to focus further down the stack, becoming one of the early evangelists of and contributors to open source projects in the emerging Docker/container ecosystem.

Twitter for errordeveloper
Photo of Stefan Prodan

Stefan Prodan is a developer experience engineer at Weaveworks. Previously, he was a software architect and a DevOps consultant, helping companies embrace DevOps and the SRE movement. Stefan has over 15 years of experience with software development. He enjoys programming in Go and writing about distributed systems.

Twitter for stefanprodan

Conference registration

Get the Platinum pass or the Training pass to add this course to your package.