Building a Prometheus Server

Prometheus is a powerful tool for monitoring your infrastructure. Getting started with Prometheus is as easy as setting up a single Prometheus server. There are multiple ways to install Prometheus. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to set up a Prometheus server by installing Prometheus from pre-compiled binaries made available by the Prometheus team.

Learning Objectives

Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:

Download and Install Prometheus

Create the prometheus user and directories:

sudo useradd -M -r -s /bin/false prometheus

sudo mkdir /etc/prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Download and extract the pre-compiled binaries:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.16.0/prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar xzf prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/

Move the files from the downloaded archive to the appropriate locations, and set ownership on these files and directories to the prometheus user:

sudo cp prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/{prometheus,promtool} /usr/local/bin/

sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /usr/local/bin/{prometheus,promtool}

sudo cp -r prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/{consoles,console_libraries} /etc/prometheus/

sudo cp prometheus-2.16.0.linux-amd64/prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

sudo chown -R prometheus:prometheus /etc/prometheus

sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Run Prometheus in the foreground to make sure everything is set up correctly so far:
```
prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```

Configure Prometheus as a `systemd` Service

Create a systemd unit file for Prometheus:

sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service

Define the Prometheus service in the unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Time Series Collection and Processing Server
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus 
    --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml 
    --storage.tsdb.path /var/lib/prometheus/ 
    --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles 
    --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start and enable the Prometheus service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start prometheus

sudo systemctl enable prometheus

Verify the Prometheus service is healthy:
```
sudo systemctl status prometheus
```
Make an HTTP request to Prometheus to verify it is able to respond:
```
curl localhost:9090
```
You can also access Prometheus in a browser using the server’s public IP address: http://<PROMETHEUS_SERVER_PUBLIC_IP>:9090.

What are Hands-on Labs

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Building a Prometheus Server

About this Hands-on Lab

Learning Objectives

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