Prometheus Monitoring Training

Lesson 1 • Prometheus History and Design Goals

Traces Prometheus's origin at SoundCloud and its CNCF adoption. Explains design decisions that shape every configuration choice students will make.

Lesson 2 • Prometheus Architecture Overview

Maps all major components: server, exporters, Alertmanager, and Pushgateway. Students gain a mental model that guides installation and configuration decisions.

Lesson 3 • Observability and Monitoring Fundamentals

Defines monitoring, observability, and the three pillars: metrics, logs, and traces. Establishes the conceptual baseline for all Prometheus topics ahead.

Lesson 1 • Storage and Retention Settings

Explains the local TSDB, block compaction, and retention flags. Students tune storage to balance disk usage against query performance.

Lesson 2 • Installation Methods and Prerequisites

Covers binary, Docker, and package-manager installation paths. Students choose the method that fits their environment before proceeding to configuration.

Lesson 3 • Running Prometheus as a Service

Covers systemd unit files, startup flags, and log management. Students leave with a production-grade service that survives reboots.

Lesson 4 • Scrape Configuration and Targets

Teaches how to define scrape jobs, set intervals, and apply per-job overrides. Students configure Prometheus to collect metrics from real endpoints.

Lesson 1 • File-Based Service Discovery

Configures file_sd_configs with JSON and YAML target files and hot-reload behavior. Students automate target updates without restarting Prometheus.

Lesson 2 • Cloud and Orchestrator Discovery

Covers Kubernetes, EC2, Consul, and other built-in discovery integrations. Students connect Prometheus to dynamic environments common in production.

Lesson 3 • Validating and Troubleshooting Targets

Uses the /targets UI page, HTTP API, and logs to diagnose scrape failures. Students resolve common discovery and connectivity issues independently.

Lesson 4 • Relabeling for Target Transformation

Explains relabel_configs actions: replace, keep, drop, labelmap, and hashmod. Relabeling is the primary tool for shaping target metadata and filtering.

Lesson 1 • Official Exporters Overview

Surveys Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, and other widely used official exporters. Students understand which exporter fits each monitoring target.

Lesson 2 • Blackbox Exporter for Synthetic Probing

Configures HTTP, TCP, ICMP, and DNS probes to monitor external endpoints. Students detect availability and latency issues from an outside perspective.

Lesson 3 • Deploying and Configuring Node Exporter

Walks through installing Node Exporter, enabling collectors, and securing the endpoint. Node Exporter is the most common starting point for infrastructure monitoring.

Lesson 4 • Custom Instrumentation with Client Libraries

Teaches metric registration and exposition using Go, Python, and Java client libraries. Students add Prometheus metrics directly to application code.

Lesson 1 • Arithmetic and Comparison Operators

Covers binary arithmetic, comparison, and logical operators with vector matching. Students combine metrics from different series correctly.

Lesson 2 • Advanced PromQL Techniques

Covers predict_linear, histogram_quantile, label_replace, and subqueries. Students solve complex real-world query problems with these advanced tools.

Lesson 3 • Aggregation Operators

Teaches sum, avg, min, max, count, and topk with by and without clauses. Aggregation is essential for reducing cardinality in dashboards and alerts.

Lesson 4 • Functions for Rate and Change

Explains rate, irate, increase, delta, and deriv for analyzing counter and gauge trends. Students select the correct function for each metric type.

Lesson 1 • Inhibition, Silencing, and Alert Quality

Uses inhibit_rules to suppress downstream alerts and silences for maintenance windows. Students reduce alert fatigue while preserving signal integrity.

Lesson 2 • Receivers and Notification Channels

Sets up email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhook, and other receiver integrations. Students configure and test each channel to confirm delivery.

Lesson 3 • Routing and Grouping Alerts

Configures route trees, group_by, group_wait, and group_interval settings. Proper routing ensures the right team receives the right alert at the right time.

Lesson 4 • Alertmanager Architecture and Setup

Explains Alertmanager's pipeline: routing, grouping, inhibition, and silencing. Students install and connect Alertmanager to Prometheus correctly.

Lesson 1 • Connecting Grafana to Prometheus

Adds Prometheus as a Grafana data source and verifies connectivity. This is the prerequisite step before any visualization work can begin.

Lesson 2 • Dashboard Design Best Practices

Applies USE and RED method frameworks to structure dashboards for fast incident response. Students evaluate and improve existing dashboards against these standards.

Lesson 3 • Variables and Templating

Defines query, custom, and interval variables to make dashboards dynamic. Templating allows a single dashboard to cover multiple services or environments.

Lesson 4 • Importing and Managing Dashboards

Imports community dashboards from Grafana.com and manages them with version control. Students avoid dashboard sprawl through folder organization and permissions.

Lesson 1 • Long-Term Storage Backends

Surveys Thanos, Cortex, Mimir, and VictoriaMetrics as remote storage solutions. Students select a backend based on retention, query, and operational requirements.

Lesson 2 • Scaling Prometheus Horizontally

Addresses cardinality limits, sharding strategies, and functional decomposition. Students identify when a single Prometheus instance is insufficient.

Lesson 3 • Remote Write and Remote Read

Configures remote_write and remote_read to integrate external storage systems. Students offload long-term retention from local TSDB to scalable backends.

Lesson 4 • Prometheus Federation

Configures hierarchical and cross-service federation using the /federate endpoint. Students aggregate metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into a global view.