Practitioner Level

Building a Prometheus Server

45 minutes

2 Learning Objectives

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.

Additional Resources

You have just started your new job at LimeDrop, a new startup that provides a subscription service that ships a weekly box of limes to customers. Apparently, people are really into limes at the moment, so the company is growing rapidly. The company has built a complex infrastructure running both on-premises and in the cloud.

Unfortunately, LimeDrop has not yet invested much time in setting up monitoring for the various components of their infrastructure. This makes it difficult to diagnose and anticipate problems. Your first task is to set up a Prometheus server that will monitor LimeDrop's infrastructure. An Ubuntu server has been made available to you for this purpose.

Download and install the Prometheus pre-compiled binaries, and then configure Prometheus as a systemd service and start it.

If you get stuck, feel free to check out the solution video, or the detailed instructions under each objective. Good luck!

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