A Fun and Easy Guide to Monitoring and Observability With Prometheus

Hi Guys !! I am back with another interesting blog where we learn the concepts but in a funny and easy way.

What is Prometheus ?

Boring Version 💤💤

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally developed by SoundCloud in 2012. It was designed to monitor systems, track metrics, and trigger alerts based on those metrics. Prometheus uses a powerful query language called PromQL to collect and analyze time-series data from various services and applications. It stores data in a time-series database, making it easy to track trends over time. Prometheus is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is widely used in cloud-native environments for monitoring microservices, containers, and more.

Funny Version 😂😂

Imagine throwing a party where you need to keep track of everything — from who’s dancing to how loud the music is. Prometheus is like your super-organized friend who monitors it all in real-time, sending you alerts if the punch bowl is low or if a conga line breaks out. Born at SoundCloud in 2012, Prometheus quickly became the ultimate party planner for techies, ensuring everything runs smoothly in the cloud-native world.

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Integration of Prometheus with Cortex

As we promised in our previous blog Prometheus as Scale – Part 1 that in our next blog we will be writing about the implementation part of Cortex with Prometheus, so here we are with our promise. But before going to the implementation part, we would suggest you guys go through our first blog to know the need for it.

Previously we talked that Prometheus is becoming a go-to option for people who want to implement event-based monitoring and alerting. The implementation and management of Prometheus are quite easy. But when we have a large infrastructure to monitor or the infrastructure has started to grow you require to scale monitoring solution as well.

A few days back we were also in a similar kind of situation where one of our client’s infrastructure was growing as per the need and they need a resilient, scalable, and reliable monitoring system. Since they were already using the Prometheus, so we explored our option and came across an interesting project called “Cortex“.

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Dependency Management with Renovate: Beyond the Limits of Dependabot

While mature CI pipelines often incorporate security scanner tools like Trivy and Clair. But these tools primarily identify vulnerabilities and to fix those vulnerabilities, developers manually upgrade versions of those dependencies like packages, libraries, etc.

Manually managing dependencies in software development can be a time-consuming and error-prone process, leading to several challenges. What if we use a tool that scans the entire repo and detects if updates/patches are available or not and raises PR to upgrade dependency automatically, allowing developers to review and merge them as needed. This proactive approach helps prevent the introduction of vulnerabilities in the first place by ensuring dependencies are kept up-to-date until it is zero-day vulnerabilities.

This blog introduces you to Renovate, a powerful open-source tool that automates dependency management. As an open-source, it offers various ways of installing and configuring it. We will specifically focus on installation using the command-line interface (CLI), in this blog.

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Agentless Monitoring: Integrating Supabase Metrics with Grafana Cloud

The Power of Agentless Monitoring

Before we dive into the technicalities, let’s understand the core benefits of agentless monitoring. It’s like having a silent guardian for your application, one that doesn’t require the extra resources or management overhead that traditional agents do. This means less complexity, less maintenance overhead, and better accuracy in your monitoring.

TLDR; If you have a service exposing prometheus compatible endpoint, then you can scrape those metrics directly with services like Grafana Cloud without needing any intermediate agent.

Why Supabase and Grafana Cloud

Supabase is making waves as a top pick for developers needing a backend service, thanks to its solid PostgreSQL base and ease of use.

Grafana Cloud brings a lot to the table, with its easy-to-use features like drag-and-drop dashboards, smart alerts, and even some clever machine learning tricks to help you spot and fix problems before they blow up. In short, Grafana Cloud doesn’t just make monitoring simpler; it makes it smarter, helping developers keep their apps running smoothly and their users happy.