Prometheus has become a de facto standard for exposing metrics from cloud-native applications and services. While originally intended as a time series database (TSDB) and monitoring stack, Prometheus metrics can now be used across different monitoring vendors through open standards like Open Metrics. This has implications for how monitoring vendors operate and provide value. Rather than seeing Prometheus as a threat, vendors should embrace the ecosystem and offer services that support Prometheus, like providing a scalable Prometheus backend, visualization tools, and metric collection agents. Doing so allows vendors to continue helping customers while respecting the open standards and tools they choose to use.

1. Jorge Salamero - @bencerillo
Sysdig - PromCon 2018
What Prometheus
means for
monitoring vendors

2. What is a monitoring vendor?

3. Different vendors provide monitoring
- Traditional based vendors
- Database based vendors
- Prometheus added-value vendors

4. What is Prometheus?

5. Multiple meanings for a word
- TSDB: metrics server
- Monitoring stack
- Metrics interface
- A way to instrument your code

6. A way to instrument your code

7. - JMX
- statsd
- expvars
- push to vendor API
Monitoring vendors had to provide
customers custom metrics

8. - maintain huge code base with little value
- different interfaces between vendors
- not always available for your language
- doesn’t work with microservices / Kubernetes
PITA for everyone

9. - Metrics 2.0
- dogstatsd
- Prometheus metrics
- Open Metrics
- Open Census
Trying to fix this problem

10. - Defacto industry standard for exposing metrics
- Cloud-Native apps support OOB
- k8s: apiserver, kube-controller-manager, etcd
- kube-state-metrics
- services: istio, traefik, coredns, fluentd, rook
- Instrument once, support many
- Open source and commercial tools
- Different purposes: infra and APM
- Can we kill checks/exporters/scripts to
massage jsons?
Prometheus metrics

11. {
host: dfs1
what: diskspace
mountpoint: srv/node/dfs10
unit: B
type: used
metric_type: gauge
}
meta: {
agent: diamond,
processed_by: statsd2
}

12. Monitoring stack

13. - Prometheus server
- AlertManager
- Grafana
- Exporters
- Push Gateway
Prometheus monitoring stack

14. - Prometheus stack DIY
- Different organizations, different needs
- User experience touch points:
- visualization
- metric collection
Embracing Prometheus ecosystem

15. - Grafana has become a popular interface
- Some teams don’t want to change
- Some teams still prefer vendor’s UI
- Give the choice
https://github.com/draios/grafana-sysdig-datasource
Visualization: Prometheus UI

16. - cadvisor, node_exporter, kube-state-metrics
- Sysdig’s commercial agent:
- eBPF / kernel module syscall tracing
- per process metrics
- short lived processes
- container agnostic
- host instrumentation vs sidecar
- Expose metrics as a exporter
Metric collection

17. Prometheus metrics server

18. - Some orgs want to run Prometheus
- Alone or with other monitoring tools
- Provide support to them anyway
- Challenges:
- Scalability
- Multiple backends
- Long term storage
- Operations
Prometheus metrics server

19. - Offer hosted Prometheus backend
- Alternative backend (Sysdig):
- Scalability, LTS, operations, RBAC
- PromQL: defacto industry standard for
querying metrics
- Interface to other services:
- Kubernetes custom-metrics-api-server
https://github.com/draios/kubernetes-sysdig-metrics-apiserver
Vendors helping with the backend

20. To wrap up

21. - Some have seen Prometheus as a threat
- We believe it’s an opportunity:
- Metrics standardization
- Do more:
- scale with the ecosystem
- approach new opportunities
- contribute back to the community
- Open source users are not lost deals,
think how you can provide value to
people using open source
Monitoring vendors and Prometheus

22. - Offer Prometheus support
- Allow to mix and match
- Visualization (Grafana or Sysdig Monitor)
- Metric collection (Sysdig agent for Prometheus
users)
- Backend (Sysdig backend with Grafana and exporters)
- Contribute back:
- Sysdig and Sysdig Inspect, Falco, etc.
Sysdig ❤ Prometheus

23. Thank you! :)
Help us with the Prometheus
user survey:
https://setns.run/2KGIZ9e
Jorge Salamero - @bencerillo
Questions?