Prometheus

The right task finally showed up: we rolled out Prometheus + Grafana to track all the little things on the production-floor and equipment side — the stuff that's awkward to shove into PRTG and ELK. A modest niche, but its own: the plumbing we'd prepared earlier finally got put to work.

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting system built around time-series metrics (values over time) and labels (a set of key-value pairs that "tag" a metric).

How we use it

We don't — and that's the whole story. We've prepared the plumbing to expose metrics from our services, but historically our system engineers run PRTG, and together with ELK it covers all current monitoring needs. We didn't want to duplicate infrastructure for the sake of a pretty idea — keeping it in assess until the right task comes along.