Prometheus seeks to be a new generation within open source monitoring tools. A different approach with no legacies from the past.

For years, many monitoring tools have been linked to Nagios for its architecture and philosophy or directly for being a complete fork (CheckMk, Centreon, OpsView, Icinga, Naemon, Shinken, Vigilo NMS, NetXMS, OP5 and others).

Prometheus software, however, is true to the “Open” spirit: if you want to use it, you will have to put together several different parts.

Somehow, like Nagios, we can say that it is a kind of monitoring Ikea: you will be able to do many things with it, but you will need to put the pieces together yourself and devote a lot of time to it.

Prometheus network monitoring architecture

Prometheus, written in the go programming language, has an architecture based on the integration of third-party free technologies:

Unlike other well-known systems, which also have many plugins and parts to present maps, Prometheus needs third parties to, for example, display data (Grafana) or execute notifications (Pagerduty).

All those high-level elements can be replaced by other pieces, but Prometheus is part of an ecosystem, not a single tool. That’s why it has exporters and key pieces that in the background are other Opensource projects:

• HAProxy
• StatsD
• Graphite
• Grafana
• Pagerduty
• OpsGenie
• and we could go on and on.

What is Prometheus monitoring?

As we mentioned, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool.

The main difference with the rest of the tools we have, is that Prometheus is conceived as a framework for collecting data of undefined structure (key value), rather than as a monitoring tool. This allows you to define a syntax for your evaluation and thus store only in case of change events.

If you’re familiar with RRD, you’re thinking the right thing.

Prometheus does not store data in an SQL database.

Like Graphite, which does something similar, like other systems from another generation that store numerical series in RRD files, Prometheus stores each data series in a special file. 

If you are looking for a Time series database information gathering tool, you should take a look at OpenTSBD, InfluxDB or Graphite.

What to use Prometheus for?

Or rather, why NOT use Prometheus.

They themselves say it on their website: if you are going to use this tool to collect logs, DO NOT DO it, they propose ELK instead.

If you want to use Prometheus to monitor applications, servers or remote computers using SNMP, you may do so and generate beautiful graphics with Grafana, but first of all…

Prometheus Settings

All Prometheus software configuration is done in YAML text files, with a rather complex syntax. In addition, each employed exporter has its own independent configuration file.

In the event of a configuration change, you will need to restart the service to make sure it takes the changes.

Prometheus reports

By default, Prometheus monitoring has no report type.

You will have to program them yourself using their API to retrieve data.

Of course, there are some independent projects to achieve this.

Dashboards and visual displays

To have a dashboard in Prometheus, you’ll need to integrate it with Grafana.

There is documentation of how to do this, as Grafana and Prometheus coexist amicably.

Scalability in Prometheus

If you need to process more data sources in Prometheus, you may always add more servers.

Each server processes its own workload, because each Prometheus server is independent and can work even if its peers fail. 

Of course, you will have to “divide” the servers by functional areas to be able to differentiate them, e.g.: “service A, service B”. So that each server is independent.

There does not seem to be a way to “scale” as we understand it, since there is no way to synchronize, recover data and it does not have high availability or a common access framework to information on different independent servers.

But as we warned at the beginning, this is not a “closed” solution but a framework for designing your own final solution.

Of course, there is no doubt that Prometheus is able to absorb a lot of information, following another order of magnitude than other better known tools.

Monitoring with Prometheus: exporters and collectors

Somehow, each different “way” of obtaining information with this tool, needs a piece of software that they call “exporter”.

It is still a binary with its own YAML configuration file that must be managed independently (with its own daemon, configuration file, etc.).

It would be the equivalent of a “plugin” in Nagios.

So, for example, Prometheus has exporters for SNMP (snmp_exporter), log monitoring (grok_exporter), and so on.

Example of configuring an snmp exporter as a service:

To get information from a host, you may install a “node_exporter” that works as a conventional agent, similar to those of Nagios.

These “node_exporters” collect metrics of different types, in what they call “collectors”.

By default, Prometheus has activated dozens of these collectors. You may check them all by navigating to Annex 1: active collectors.

And, in addition, there are a multitude of “exporters” or plugins, to obtain information from different hardware and software systems.

Although the number of exporters is relevant (about 200), it does not reach the level of plugins available for Nagios (more than 2000).

Here we have included an example of an Oracle exporter.

Conclusion

Prometheus’ approach for modern monitoring is much more flexible than that of older tools. Thanks to its philosophy, you may integrate it into hybrid environments more easily.

However, you will miss reports, dashboards and a centralized configuration management system.

That is, an interface that allows observing and monitoring information grouped in services / hosts.

Because Prometheus is a data processing ecosystem, not a common IT monitoring system.

Its power in data processing is far superior, but the use of that data for day-to-day use makes it extremely complex to manage, as it requires many configuration files, many distributed external commands and everything must be maintained manually.

Appendix 1: Collectors active in Prometheus

Here are the collectors that Prometheus has active by default:

These “node_exporter” collect metrics of different types, in what they call “collectors”, these are the serial collectors that are activated:

arp	Exposes ARP statistics from /proc/net/arp.
bcache	Exposes bcache statistics from /sys/fs/bcache/.
bonding	Exposes the number of configured and active slaves of Linux bonding interfaces.
btrfs	Exposes btrfs statistics
boottime	Exposes system boot time derived from the kern.boottime sysctl.
conntrack	Shows conntrack statistics (does nothing if no /proc/sys/net/netfilter/ present).
cpu	Exposes CPU statistics
cpufreq	Exposes CPU frequency statistics
diskstats	Exposes disk I/O statistics.
dmi	Expose Desktop Management Interface (DMI) info from /sys/class/dmi/id/
edac	Exposes error detection and correction statistics.
entropy	Exposes available entropy.
exec	Exposes execution statistics.
fibrechannel	Exposes fibre channel information and statistics from /sys/class/fc_host/.
filefd	Exposes file descriptor statistics from /proc/sys/fs/file-nr.
filesystem	Exposes filesystem statistics, such as disk space used.
hwmon	Expose hardware monitoring and sensor data from /sys/class/hwmon/.
infiniband	Exposes network statistics specific to InfiniBand and Intel OmniPath configurations.
ipvs	Exposes IPVS status from /proc/net/ip_vs and stats from /proc/net/ip_vs_stats.
loadavg	Exposes load average.
mdadm	Exposes statistics about devices in /proc/mdstat (does nothing if no /proc/mdstat present).
meminfo	Exposes memory statistics.
netclass	Exposes network interface info from /sys/class/net/
netdev	Exposes network interface statistics such as bytes transferred.
netstat	Exposes network statistics from /proc/net/netstat. This is the same information as netstat -s.
nfs	Exposes NFS client statistics from /proc/net/rpc/nfs. This is the same information as nfsstat -c.
nfsd	Exposes NFS kernel server statistics from /proc/net/rpc/nfsd. This is the same information as nfsstat -s.
nvme	Exposes NVMe info from /sys/class/nvme/
os	Expose OS release info from /etc/os-release or /usr/lib/os-release
powersupplyclass	Exposes Power Supply statistics from /sys/class/power_supply
pressure	Exposes pressure stall statistics from /proc/pressure/.
rapl	Exposes various statistics from /sys/class/powercap.
schedstat	Exposes task scheduler statistics from /proc/schedstat.
sockstat	Exposes various statistics from /proc/net/sockstat.
softnet	Exposes statistics from /proc/net/softnet_stat.
stat	Exposes various statistics from /proc/stat. This includes boot time, forks and interrupts.
tapestats	Exposes statistics from /sys/class/scsi_tape.
textfile	Exposes statistics read from local disk. The –collector.textfile.directory flag must be set.
thermal	Exposes thermal statistics like pmset -g therm.
thermal_zone	Exposes thermal zone & cooling device statistics from /sys/class/thermal.
time	Exposes the current system time.
timex	Exposes selected adjtimex(2) system call stats.
udp_queues	Exposes UDP total lengths of the rx_queue and tx_queue from /proc/net/udp and /proc/net/udp6.
uname	Exposes system information as provided by the uname system call.
vmstat	Exposes statistics from /proc/vmstat.
xfs	Exposes XFS runtime statistics.
zfs	Exposes ZFS performance statistics.

Appendix 2: Oracle exporter example

This is an example of the type of information that an Oracle exporter returns, which is invoked by configuring a file and a set of environment variables that define credentials and SID:

• oracledb_exporter_last_scrape_duration_seconds
• oracledb_exporter_last_scrape_error
• oracledb_exporter_scrapes_total
• oracledb_up
• oracledb_activity_execute_count
• oracledb_activity_parse_count_total
• oracledb_activity_user_commits
• oracledb_activity_user_rollbacks
• oracledb_sessions_activity
• oracledb_wait_time_application
• oracledb_wait_time_commit
• oracledb_wait_time_concurrency
• oracledb_wait_time_configuration
• oracledb_wait_time_network
• oracledb_wait_time_other
• oracledb_wait_time_scheduler
• oracledb_wait_time_system_io
• oracledb_wait_time_user_io
• oracledb_tablespace_bytes
• oracledb_tablespace_max_bytes
• oracledb_tablespace_free
• oracledb_tablespace_used_percent
• oracledb_process_count
• oracledb_resource_current_utilization
• oracledb_resource_limit_value

To get an idea of how an exporter is configured, let’s look at an example, with an JMX exporter configuration file:

---
startDelaySeconds: 0
hostPort: 127.0.0.1:1234
username: 
password: 
jmxUrl: service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://127.0.0.1:1234/jmxrmi
ssl: false
lowercaseOutputName: false
lowercaseOutputLabelNames: false
whitelistObjectNames: ["org.apache.cassandra.metrics:*"]
blacklistObjectNames: ["org.apache.cassandra.metrics:type=ColumnFamily,*"]
rules:
  - pattern: 'org.apache.cassandra.metrics<type=(\w+), name=(\w+)><>Value: (\d+)'
    name: cassandra_$1_$2
    value: $3
    valueFactor: 0.001
    labels: {}
    help: "Cassandra metric $1 $2"
    cache: false
    type: GAUGE
    attrNameSnakeCase: false

When you leave the faculty with a smile on your face and after the undertow of the graduation celebration, you hope that the great multinationals approach you with hundreds and varied jobs. “Take this huge sum of money and work on what you always dreamed of”…

But nothing could be further from the truth.

For that reason, today in Pandora FMS blog, we give you our sincere condolences for facing that load of hunting for a job related to “your stuff” and a couple of pages totally necessary to find an IT job.

*We know that there are millions of specialized people that look for an article like this, from water stocker in IT to those who prepare a megalomaniac IA in their garage, but this time we have wanted to focus on looking for an IT job. 

** Even so, these pages are very versatile and are helpful for many more specialties. Look among them for a job that suits your specialties.

Do you know where you have to look for an IT job?

Ticjob

Good stuff: Ticjob. We dive right into it with one of the most valued portals of IT jobs in Spain. 

Go in, thread between the offers with enough precision, since you can choose among role categories, development, system, business… Choose and forget about it. Soon you will find something!

If I were you, I would sign up immediately, because you may find companies that usually do not appear in other more well-known platforms. 

TalentHackers

Talent Hackers. We already explained to you why you don’t have to fear the word “hacker”, because it can have positive connotations and, of course, it has them here.

We face here a very singular platform for job hunting: 

Its aim is to catch talents within the technological scope through one distributed network. That is, by means of searching and picking up professionals through references later repaid. 

What does this mean?
It means that if the candidate which you recommend for a position is the selected one you can take up to 3,000 bucks.

Manfred

Manfred: “We manage talent, not selection processes”. With this quote, the company makes clear that it is not a common portal.

Rather, Manfred claims to be a platform that offers “IT recruitment” and gives the candidate an experience totally different from that we are used to with the rest of this type of services.

Manfred takes less into account the necessities of the companies and worries more about the programmers that look for a job.

1. You sign up.
2. You are assigned a person that will be in charge of you, who will inform you about the most interesting opportunities that comply with the profile which you previously detailed.
3. You are advised with the utmost respect.
4. You realize everything is for free for IT profiles and they only charge companies that hire them.

TekkieFinder

“We are the ONLY job portal that PAYS you whenever a company contacts you.” This is what TekkieFinder promises. Do you like the idea?

Is very easy: You register, fill in your profile happily, they get you in their database and, here’s the good stuff, when a company is interested in you, it buys your profile from TekkieFinder to be able contact you, and whether you are interested in the offer or not, you get paid!

There is such a shortage of IT professionals that it is changing the way to take control over them. They are like exotic legendary pokemon hidden behind an ancient glitch. What IT professional wouldn’t be thrilled with this platform?

Circular

Looking for something truly individualized and round? Get in Circular

Circular is similar to the previous employment portal mentioned: Manfred. Although it gives you a less personal feeling than Manfred, among the Spanish platforms, it is the best one in this feature.

Circular, like the dating application Tinder, it gathers companies and applicants all together. 

First, you sign up, then a friend of yours/contact within the platform recommends you, since if they do not do it, you will not be able to contact the companies, and that’s it!

GeeksHubs

GeeksHubs is without a doubt one of the best options if you look for an IT job in Spain. 

Systems/DevOps, Back-end, Front-end, Mobile, FullStack,… These are some of the categories that you will be able to find in your sector. In addition to enough information on each vacancy, so that it becomes clear whether it interests you or not. 

And, in addition, they say how much they are willing to pay you, which is the most interesting part and it is what many hide. 

Growara

 Growara gets in your shoes and it never offers to its users a project in which they themselves would not work. In fact, it seems that they only work with companies that are actually worth it.

They never ghost you, since they seem to feed on the feedback that you can offer them.

The best thing? They don’t bother spamming you with thousands of offers that do not have anything to do with your professional development. They look for precise and elegant matches that meet your values and capacities.

Tecnoempleo

Tecnoempleo is that portal specialized in computer science, telecommunications and technology that you’re looking for.

More than half a million candidates and 27 thousand companies guarantee its 20 years of professional expertise in the sector.

Although just for having its own mobile app, and specific sections for working abroad or remotely, or looking for your first job, I would choose it hands down.

Primer Empleo

If you are a newbie this is your site, Primer Empleo.

A job portal founded in 2002 and directed specifically to students and recent graduates without labor experience.

So if you have a junior profile and you want to check it out, go ahead. Even if you have not even finished your grade and you are only looking for an internship, it is quite interesting.

Jooble 

Jooble and Jooble Mexico are websites that take you to many and a wide range of existing job offers in other pages.  Perhaps you lose some time signing up to each one of them, but it may be worth it if you end up getting your way. 

It is worth pointing out that, if you get a job thanks to this article, you should treat us to something, even if it’s just a coffee. Always depending on the job you got and its consequent remuneration, of course!

Conclusions

Looking for a job is a task that is already too ungrateful for you to not accept our help through this article and these links. After all, we have been there and we know how lost and frustrated one can feel.

Good luck and take courage in your job hunting!