Building a Highly Available Prometheus Setup

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Building a Highly Available Prometheus Setup

A single Prometheus server can provide a great deal of value in terms of monitoring. However, it can also become a single point of failure if something goes wrong. Luckily, the simple architecture employed by Prometheus makes it relatively easy to set up additional Prometheus servers in a highly-available configuration. In this lab, you will see what this looks like as you build your own highly-available, multi-instance Prometheus setup.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 21, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Copy the Prometheus configuration from the existing Prometheus server to the new instance.
1. Log in to Prometheus Server 1.
2. Copy prometheus.yml to Prometheus Server 2.
```
scp /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml [email protected]:/home/cloud_user
```
1. Log in to Prometheus Server 2.
2. Copy prometheus.yml to the appropriate location.
```
sudo cp ~/prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```
Challenge

Copy the rules configuration from the existing Prometheus server to the new instance.
1. On Prometheus Server 1, view prometheus.yml to determine the rules location(s) under rule_files:
```
cat /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```
1. Copy files from the rules directory to Prometheus Server 2:
```
scp /etc/prometheus/rules/* [email protected]:/home/cloud_user
```
1. On Prometheus Server 2, create the rules directory, then copy the rules file to the appropriate location:
```
sudo mkdir -p /etc/prometheus/rules

sudo cp ~/limedrop-alerts.yml /etc/prometheus/rules
```
Challenge

Start the new Prometheus instance and verify that everything is working.
1. On Prometheus Server 2, start and enable Prometheus:
```
sudo systemctl enable prometheus

sudo systemctl start prometheus
```
1. Access Prometheus Server 2 in a browser at http://<Prometheus Server 2 Public IP>:9090. Run a query to verify that it is scraping metrics from limedrop-web:
```
up{instance="limedrop-web:9100"}
```
1. You can also click Alerts to verify that the WebServerDown alert appears.

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