Don't Make These 6 Prometheus Monitoring Mistakes | Prometheus Best Practices & Pitfalls

In this video, I go through some of the biggest pitfalls you can run into when you're new to Prometheus, and I also explain how to avoid them.

Check out my Prometheus training courses if you want to learn Prometheus in a structured way from the ground up:

Related PromLabs blog post about these pitfalls:

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:22 Mistake 1: Cardinality Bombs
02:28 Mistake 2: Aggregating Away Too Many Labels
03:48 Mistake 3: Unscoped Metric Selectors
04:49 Mistake 4: Missing "for" Durations in Alerting Rules
06:52 Mistake 5: Too Short Rate Windows
08:36 Mistake 6: Using Functions With Incorrect Metric Types
10:20 Outro & PromLabs Trainings

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[rishabhverma]

Very happy that i came across your channel. I am quite new to Prometheus and your content has already helped me out a bunch. Thanks Julius

[hijacked]

I am really hyped to find your channel, been working with prometheus for a few years now, it was my primary reason to begin learning golang also
instantly subscribed, I'll be lurking here on my weekends! ♥

[rafiraf]

Great content, thank you for recording it!

[BlackUnicornVlogs]

YAYYY!!! It's awesome to see how this series is progressing. Another winner 😎

[YuruCampSupermacy]

Loved the video. Looking forward to more.

[mickiXXX]

Thanks Julius for all your videos. They are very useful for me. 👍

[Jam-htky]

This would definitely make a great series!

[RSS]

Thanks for the video! Very informative

[nikitaruy]

Thank you for the video! :) Very good content!

[PromLabs]

Let me know what other kinds of Prometheus pitfalls and best practices you'd like to learn about! These were some technical ones that I've mentioned a lot in talks, but there are surely many others.

[theophani]

Ahhh!! All mistakes I’ve encountered! (including ones I made …). Great summary. I’m sure I’ll refer back to this one.

[prinzgonzo]

Hey Julius, thank you for your video. Which metric type would you propose to avoid cardinality bombs in case I want to record labels that can have lots of different values? Is there a way to change the grouping mechanism in a way that prometheus will not create a new time series for every label combination?

[suparna]

Hi, just now started using prometheus. I am trying to set rate function for counter.. so i have a counter metric and the values is 1.. when i use rate for counter rate of first entry a at that time starts with 0..why for the rate of first new single instrumwntation entry starts with 0. How to resolve that..i want rate /changes/ increases should starts with non zero and then it should become 0 when its idle how to achieve this

[stephennfernandes]

hey julien, i am pretty new to prometheus. i want to know that can we also track user level behaviour in prometheus or would i need to use a total separate tooling for that. i wanted to know what my users are doing, and watch indidividual user behaviours

[XavierTibudon]

Awesome content, Julius. I find it extremely useful, but it took me 2 months to finde it! I'll do what I can to spread the word through my channels. Insanely popular as it is, most implementations I come across during SRE consultancy engagements, only exploit a small fraction of its value. All the best, @XavierThibaudon