1. What is Prometheus and what is it used for?
Ans: Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit designed to collect metrics from applications, infrastructure, and services, and provide real-time monitoring of system performance.
2. How does Prometheus collect metrics?
Ans: Prometheus collects metrics through a pull-based model where it periodically scrapes HTTP endpoints that expose metrics in a format that Prometheus understands
3. Can you explain what Grafana is and its use cases?
Ans: Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring platform used to create interactive and dynamic dashboards from various data sources. It is commonly used in conjunction with time-series databases like Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Elasticsearch, but supports a wide range of other data sources, including SQL databases, cloud services, and more. Grafana enables users to track and visualize key metrics, monitor system performance, and set up alerts for proactive issue detection.
4. How do Prometheus and Grafana work together?
Ans: Prometheus and Grafana are often used together in monitoring and observability setups, providing complementary roles: Prometheus is responsible for collecting, storing, and querying metrics, while Grafana is used to visualize these metrics through dynamic, customizable dashboards.
5. What are Prometheus exporters, and can you give an example?
Ans: Prometheus exporters are specialized software components or agents that collect metrics from systems, services, or applications that do not natively expose metrics in the Prometheus format. Exporters act as intermediaries, gathering metrics from these systems and exposing them in the format that Prometheus understands (i.e., at an HTTP /metrics endpoint). Prometheus can then scrape these metrics for monitoring and visualization.
6. How do you set up alerts in Prometheus and Grafana?
Ans: In Prometheus, you configure alerts using Alertmanager. You define alerting rules in the Prometheus configuration file, which specify the conditions for an alert (e.g., CPU usage > 90% for more than 5 minutes). These alerts are sent to Alertmanager, which routes them to various destinations (email, Slack, PagerDuty).
7. How do you manage high cardinality metrics in Prometheus?
Ans: High cardinality refers to a large number of unique label combin-ations, which can lead to increased storage and resource usage. To manage this, you can: Avoid adding too many unique labels. Limit the label values .Use aggregation to reduce the amount of stored data
8. How do you secure a Grafana instance?
Ans: Enabling authentication mechanisms like OAuth, LDAP, or Grafana’s built-in user management. Configuring HTTPS to encrypt traffic between the grafana server and users.
