Installing the Prometheus server

Our first task is to get a Prometheus server up and running so that we can start serving real data. Prometheus is a powerful open source time-series database and monitoring system originally developed by SoundCloud. It followed Kubernetes to become the second Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduating incubation project. Grafana, having partnered with the maintainers of Prometheus, includes the Prometheus data source as a first-class data source plugin. In this section, we will learn how to install Prometheus in a Docker container and then move on to configuring it.

Installing Prometheus from Docker

We’re going to start up Prometheus from Docker Compose and point it to a local configuration file. First, let’s create the following configuration file and save it to our local ch4/prometheus directory as prometheus.yml:

global:
    scrape_interval:      15s # By default, scrape targets...