The Cloudcast #263 - Monitoring Containers with Prometheus

Brian talks with Julius Volz (@juliusvolz; Co-Creator of Prometheus) about Project Prometheus, the challenges of monitoring containers, working within the CNCF and where the project will expand.

Show Links:

• Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount - 40% off Print Books and 50% off eBooks and videos
• Prometheus Homepage (project)
• Getting Started with Prometheus
• One year of Prometheus development
• Prometheus Conference (PromCon)
• Julius’s Homepage
• Julius’s GitHub Page

Show Notes:

• Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Our first guest from Germany. Give us a little bit of your background and how you got involved in creating Prometheus.

• Topic 2 - Let’s talk about the basics of Prometheus. What are the core elements and what problems did you intend for it to solve? [From Prometheus homepage: “Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud.”]

• Topic 3 - Prometheus is part of the CNCF, which is also where Kubernetes resides, but it can work with lots of different frameworks. Is there a size of deployment where you’ve found that Prometheus starts to make sense?

• Topic 4 - Adrian Cockcroft has talked a number of times about the challenges of monitoring these fast moving, fast changing systems. What are the biggest challenges of these types of systems that Prometheus is about to solve today?

• Topic 5 - We’ve traditionally seen (larger) projects come out of a vendor (e.g. Google), into an open source community. Prometheus came out of SoundCloud, which is more of an end-user. How are the projects different in terms of getting community involvement and adoption?

• Topic 6 - It’s still early in the project’s life, but have you heard of any Cloud projects that want to offer Prometheus-as-a-Service?

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