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Application Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Application Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus for Metrics Collection

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that collects metrics from your applications and infrastructure using a pull-based model. Instrument your application with four metric types: counters (request count, error count), gauges (active connections, queue size), histograms (request duration distribution), and summaries (quantile calculations). Expose metrics on a /metrics endpoint using client libraries available for every major language. Prometheus scrapes this endpoint at configurable intervals, storing time-series data efficiently for querying and alerting.

Grafana Dashboards and Alerting

Grafana visualizes Prometheus metrics in customizable dashboards. Create panels showing request rates, error percentages, response time percentiles (p50, p95, p99), and resource utilization. Use variables to filter dashboards by service, environment, or instance. Set up alert rules that trigger when metrics exceed thresholds — for example, alert when error rate exceeds 1% or p99 latency exceeds 2 seconds. Configure notification channels to send alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email. Implement the RED method (Rate, Errors, Duration) for service monitoring and the USE method (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) for infrastructure monitoring.

  • RED method: Monitor Rate, Errors, and Duration for every service endpoint
  • USE method: Monitor Utilization, Saturation, and Errors for infrastructure resources
  • Dashboard variables: Filter dashboards by service, environment, and time range
  • Alert routing: Send critical alerts to PagerDuty and warnings to Slack channels

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