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  "description": "Prometheus is an open-source time-series database and monitoring system that scrapes metrics from instrumented applications over HTTP, stores them locally, and exposes a powerful query language (PromQL) for dashboards and alerts. It is the de facto standard for cloud-native infrastructure monitoring.\n\n\nHow it works\n\nApplications expose a /metrics endpoint in the Prometheus exposition format. A Prometheus server is configured with scrape targets; on each scrape interval (typically 15 to 60 second",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/prometheus-time-series-monitoring/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T18:16:34.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "Observability",
    "Metrics",
    "Grafana",
    "OpenTelemetry",
    "Kubernetes",
    "What is API Observability? Logs, Metrics, Traces Explained"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Prometheus** is an open-source time-series database and monitoring system that scrapes metrics from instrumented applications over HTTP, stores them locally, and exposes a powerful query language (PromQL) for dashboards and alerts. It is the de facto standard for cloud-native infrastructure monitoring.\n\n## How it works\n\nApplications expose a `/metrics` endpoint in the Prometheus exposition format. A Prometheus server is configured with **scrape targets** ; on each scrape interval (typically 15 to 60 seconds), it pulls the metrics, applies relabelling, and stores them in its local TSDB. Service discovery (Kubernetes, Consul, EC2, file_sd) keeps the target list current.\n\n## PromQL\n\nPromQL is the query language for selecting time series, applying functions, and computing aggregations. Common patterns:\n\n  * `rate(http_requests_total[5m])` - requests per second over the last 5 minutes\n  * `histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(latency_bucket[5m]))` - p99 latency\n  * `sum by (route) (rate(http_requests_total[1m]))` - per-route request rate\n\n\n\n## Ecosystem\n\n  * **Alertmanager.** Receives alerts from Prometheus, deduplicates, groups, routes to Slack, PagerDuty, email.\n  * **Grafana.** The standard visualisation layer on top of Prometheus.\n  * **Exporters.** Adapters that expose metrics from third-party systems (node_exporter, blackbox_exporter, mysqld_exporter).\n  * **Long-term storage.** Thanos, Cortex, Mimir, VictoriaMetrics for horizontal scaling and multi-cluster.\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nObservability, Metrics, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes\n\n📖\n\n**Further Reading**\nWhat is API Observability? Logs, Metrics, Traces Explained",
  "title": "Prometheus",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:11:27.983Z"
}