Lab
A Cloud Guru

Building a Prometheus Server

Prometheus is a powerful tool for monitoring your infrastructure. Getting started with Prometheus is as easy as setting up a single Prometheus server. There are multiple ways to install Prometheus. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to set up a Prometheus server by installing Prometheus from pre-compiled binaries made available by the Prometheus team.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

45m

Published

Jun 12, 2020

Challenge

Download and Install Prometheus

Create the prometheus user and directories:

sudo useradd -M -r -s /bin/false prometheus

sudo mkdir /etc/prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Download and extract the pre-compiled binaries:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.16.0/prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar xzf prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/

Move the files from the downloaded archive to the appropriate locations, and set ownership on these files and directories to the prometheus user:

sudo cp prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/{prometheus,promtool} /usr/local/bin/

sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /usr/local/bin/{prometheus,promtool}

sudo cp -r prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/{consoles,console_libraries} /etc/prometheus/

sudo cp prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

sudo chown -R prometheus:prometheus /etc/prometheus

sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Run Prometheus in the foreground to make sure everything is set up correctly so far:
```
prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```

Challenge

Configure Prometheus as a `systemd` Service

Create a systemd unit file for Prometheus:

sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service

Define the Prometheus service in the unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Time Series Collection and Processing Server
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus 
    --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml 
    --storage.tsdb.path /var/lib/prometheus/ 
    --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles 
    --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start and enable the Prometheus service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start prometheus

sudo systemctl enable prometheus

Verify the Prometheus service is healthy:
```
sudo systemctl status prometheus
```
Make an HTTP request to Prometheus to verify it is able to respond:
```
curl localhost:9090
```
You can also access Prometheus in a browser using the server's public IP address: http://<PROMETHEUS_SERVER_PUBLIC_IP>:9090.

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

What's a lab?

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Follow along with the author’s guided walkthrough and build something new in your provided environment!

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