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