How to set up Prometheus in 10 minutes

👋 Hi,

Welcome to the next edition of my newsletter! 🎉

In this issue, you’ll learn:
✅ How to setup prometheus fast locally
✅ How to make your first query using the Prometheus UI

How to setup Prometheus fast?

There are a few possibilities out there to setup Prometheus in general:

• Binary → Available for Windows, Linux, Mac

• Package Manager → Available for several Linux dists

• K8s → Helm Chart

• Cloud → Several provider offering Prometheus as a Cloud Service

• Docker → Best way to create a setup locally for testing purposes 🙃 

Using docker to setup prometheus is quite fast so we will use that in the following example

🚀 Setup Prometheus locally using docker

Prerequisites: Obviously Docker should be installed

1. Create a folder for example named “Monitoring“

2. In this folder create the file “docker-compose.yml“ with the following content:

services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
    command:
      - "--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml"

3. Afterwards you need to create another file “prometheus.yml“, which is the main config for prometheus. This is the place where you configure the targets. After configuring Prometheus “pulls“ the metrics periodically. We say Prometheus to monitor itself like this with an interval of 15s:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: prometheus
    static_configs:
       - targets: ['localhost:9090']

4. Now we have everything to start Prometheus locally. Run the following command in your folder:

sudo docker compose up -d

5. Afterwards you can open the Prometheus UI opening the website at “localhost:9090“

6. In the Prometheus UI we can now make our first query by entering just “up“, which shows us all working targets. In our example we see only Prometheus itself since we “registered“ Prometheus as a target in our “prometheus.yml“

🎯 What’s Next?

In the next issue, I’ll step into the “three pillars of observability“

📢 What are you most interested in when it comes to observability? Just reply to this email

See you soon & happy monitoring! 🚀
Dennis