Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Prometheus' main distinguishing features as compared to other monitoring systems are:

• a multi-dimensional data model (timeseries defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
• a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
• no dependency on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
• timeseries collection happens via a pull model over HTTP
• pushing timeseries is supported via an intermediary gateway
• targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
• multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support
• federation support coming soon

There are various ways of installing Prometheus.

We plan to provide precompiled binaries for various platforms and even packages for common Linux distributions soon. Once those are offered, it will be the recommended way of installing Prometheus.

In most cirumstances, the following should work:

$ make build
$ ./prometheus -config.file=documentation/examples/prometheus.conf

The above requires a number of common tools to be installed, namely curl, git, gzip, hg (Mercurial CLI), sed, xxd. Should you need to change any of the protocol buffer definition files (*.proto), you also need the protocol buffer compiler protoc, v2.5.0 or higher, in your $PATH.

Everything else will be downloaded and installed into a staging environment in the .build sub-directory. That includes a Go development environment of the appropriate version.

The Makefile offers a number of useful targets. Some examples:

• make test runs tests.
• make tarball creates a tarball with the binary for distribution.
• make race_condition_run compiles and runs a binary with the race detector enabled. To pass arguments when running Prometheus this way, set the ARGUMENTS environment variable (e.g. ARGUMENTS="-config.file=./prometheus.conf" make race_condition_run).

Using your own Go development environment with the usual tooling is possible, too, but you have to take care of various generated files (usually by running make in the respective sub-directory):

• Compiling the protocol buffer definitions in config (only if you have changed them).
• Generating the parser and lexer code in rules (only if you have changed parser.y or lexer.l).
• The files.go blob in web/blob, which embeds the static web content into the binary.

Furthermore, the build info (see build_info.go) will not be populated if you simply run go build. You have to pass in command line flags as defined in Makefile.INCLUDE (see ${BUILDFLAGS}) to do that.

• The source code is periodically indexed: Prometheus Core.
• You will find a Travis CI configuration in .travis.yml.
• All of the core developers are accessible via the Prometheus Developers Mailinglist and the #prometheus channel on irc.freenode.net.

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.