PromCon 2016

Talk abstract

Prometheus Design and Philosophy

Speaker: Julius Volz

Prometheus is an opinionated monitoring system that chooses to do a lot of things differently from traditional monitoring systems. This leads to a culture clash for those used to other approaches, and raises questions as to why we didn't take a seemingly better approach. This talk focuses on the "why" behind many of the design decisions that are core to Prometheus, including pull vs. push, the dimensional data model, relabeling, per-process exporters, stateful client libraries, as well as aspects like metric naming conventions and having a non-distributed storage as a design goal.