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How Prometheus Works?

Core Concepts

Architecture Components

Architecture Overview

  • the main Prometheus server which scrapes and stores time series data
  • client libraries for instrumenting application code
  • a push gateway for supporting short-lived jobs
  • special-purpose exporters for services like HAProxy, StatsD, Graphite, etc.
  • an alertmanager to handle alerts
  • various support tools

Prometheus Agent

Prometheus Agent is a deployment model optimized for environments where all collected data is forwarded to a long-term storage solution.

Similarly to Prometheus, Prometheus Agent will also require permission to scrape targets. Because of this, we will create a new service account for the Agent with the necessary permissions to scrape targets.

See Introducing Prometheus Agent Mode, an Efficient and Cloud-Native Way for Metric Forwarding for more details.

Behind the Scenes

References