Taming Prometheus Scrapes - Understanding and Analyzing Your Metrics Endpoints

Introduction: Prometheus and the Scrape Format Prometheus is a pull-based monitoring system. Instead of having services push metrics to a central collector, Prometheus periodically fetches (or scrapes ) an HTTP endpoint (typically /metrics ) from each monitored target. The response is a plain-text document in the Prometheus exposition format , listing every metric the service wants to expose. A scrape looks something like this: # HELP http_requests_total Total number of HTTP requests. # TYPE http_requests_total counter http_requests_total{method="GET",status="200"} 1234 http_requests_total{method="GET",status="500"} 7 http_requests_total{method="POST",status="200"} 89 # HELP process_resident_memory_bytes Resident memory size in bytes. # TYPE process_resident_memory_bytes gauge process_resident_memory_bytes 52428800 Each metric family starts with optional # HELP (description) and # TYPE (counter, gauge, histogram, summary, or untyped) comment lines, followed by one or more series : indi