NetOps and SysOps Developer with Prometheus Salary in 2024

Where is Prometheus used?

Cluster Health Guru

• Imagine a digital doctor constantly checking your server's pulse, Prometheus keeps tabs on your cluster's vitals, ready to shout "Clear!" and defibrillate if it flatlines.

The Alert Whisperer

• Like your overcaffeinated buddy, it never sleeps, eyeballs glued to streams of matrix-like data, ready to poke you when things start looking funky.

Metrics Hoarder

• Think of that one friend who keeps every concert ticket stub—Prometheus collects metrics like they're going out of style, obsessively storing every tidbit of performance data.

Performance Historian

• It's like that elder telling tall tales by the fire, except Prometheus recounts epic sagas of system performance, immortalizing them in graphs and charts.

Prometheus Alternatives

Graphite

Open-source monitoring tool for storing and graphing time-series data. It offers a powerful query language and is scalable.

# Example of sending data via the plaintext protocol
echo "example.metric 42 $(date +%s)" | nc graphite.example.com 2003

• Scalable for long-term data storage


• Rich querying and graphing capabilities


• Can integrate with Grafana for better visualization


• Less user-friendly for configuration


• Interface not as modern compared to alternatives


• Limited alerting functionalities

InfluxDB

Database specifically built for handling time-series data with high performance, providing good scalability and integration with the TICK stack.

# Writing data using InfluxDB Line Protocol
curl -i -XPOST 'http://localhost:8086/write?db=mydb' --data-binary 'cpu_load_short,host=server01,region=us-west value=0.64 1434055562000000000'

• Optimized for time-series data


• High write and query performance


• Part of the TICK stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor)


• Requires understanding of InfluxQL for complex queries


• Possibly steep learning curve for database clustering


• Less mature than other time-series databases

Zabbix

Enterprise-level software for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from various sources, with auto-discovery and alerting.

# No direct code sample, as Zabbix involves configuration through its frontend or API for setup.

• Feature-rich network and application monitoring


• Auto-discovery of servers and network devices


• Customizable dashboards and alerting


• Can be complex to configure and manage


• Interface may feel clunky and outdated


• Resource-intensive for large-scale deployments

Quick Facts about Prometheus

The Birth of a Monitoring Titan

Once upon a time in 2012, the IT gods at SoundCloud got fed up with the mayhem of systems going kaput without warning. They summoned Prometheus from the digital ether, crafted by Matt T. Proud and Julius Volz. The duo embarked on a quest to create the ultimate beast for devouring metrics and spitting out insights. And thus, Prometheus was born, forever changing the landscape of system monitoring by introducing concepts like multi-dimensional data models and time series data.

Gazing into the Crystal Ball of Releases

In the swirling chaos of the software realm, Prometheus 1.0 burst forth like a shining knight in July 2016, cutting through the dark with its gleaming blade of stability guarantees. Fast forward to August 2018, and boom! Prometheus 2.0 exploded onto the scene with a storage engine revamp that sent shockwaves through the realm of monitoring, slashing memory usage like a hot knife through butter and leaving awestruck users in its wake.

Groundbreakers of the Monitoring Crusade

You think multi-dimensional labels are blase? Ha! Prometheus scoffed at the mundane offerings of other tools and conjured up a powerful query language from the cosmos – PromQL. Our eyes widened, our hearts raced as these incantations allowed us to slice and dice metric data in ways mere mortals had only dreamed of, like so:

sum by (job) (rate(http_requests_total{status="200"}[5m]))

And if that wasn't enough to blow your wizard hat off, Prometheus also heralded service discovery mechanisms that could adapt faster than a shapeshifter in a hall of mirrors, dynamically scraping targets as they danced in and out of existence in the cloud.

What is the difference between Junior, Middle, Senior and Expert Prometheus developer?

Top 10 Prometheus Related Tech

1. 
   

   Golang

   
   

   
   Picture this: you’re sculpting in clay – that's coding in Golang for you, the darling child of cloud-native systems. This Go-geous language is Prometheus's backbone, for its sheer speed and its penchant for concurrency handling is unmatched. Why, you ask? It sprints through systems metrics like nobody's business, snatching up stats without breaking a sweat. You’ll be gobbling up Goroutines and channels like they are hot cookies fresh out of the oven. Here’s a taste:
   

   
   

   
   func ScrapeMetrics() {
       // Imagine tickling your metrics until they laugh out numbers
       ticker := time.NewTicker(2 * time.Second)
       for range ticker.C {
           Go GrabMetrics()
       }
   }
           

   
   


2. 
   

   PromQL

   
   

   
   Ah, PromQL, the secret lingo where ‘histograms’ and ‘sums’ aren’t math class nightmares, but your best friends. It’s like being a detective in a data thriller, uncovering the series of counts and rates that tell the tale of your systems’ wellbeing. Whisper the right queries and dashboards come to life, brimming with graphs that would make Pythagoras weep with joy.
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Grafana

   
   

   
   Step into the art gallery of data visualization, where Grafana is the curator. You take those dry, crunchy numbers, splash them onto a dashboard, and voilà, you've got a 5-star data cuisine! It's the peanut butter to Prometheus's jelly, turning metrics into visual feasts that mere mortals (a.k.a. your bosses) can digest.
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Alertmanager

   
   

   
   The town crier of the Prometheus realm, the Alertmanager, doesn’t just cry wolf. It artfully juggles alerts across your entire park of systems. Think of it as the party planner who knows exactly when to send out the invites (a.k.a. alerts) to the right guests (a.k.a. admins). Silence's button? Yep, it has that magic 'snooze' for when you need a break.
   

   
   


5. 
   

   Kubernetes

   
   

   
   Ahoy, Captain! Steering the ship of container orchestration is Kubernetes, fondly referred to as 'K8s', because who's got time for syllables? Prometheus and K8s tightrope walk together over the high seas of scalable infrastructure. They're like Bonnie and Clyde, minus the bank robbing. Monitoring your pods? K8s whispers sweet nothings to Prometheus, keeping your data updated.
   

   
   


6. 
   

   Docker

   
   

   
   Imagine you’re a wizard and containers are your spells. Docker's the magic wand you wave to encapsulate your code in neat little enchanted packages. It's the traveling suitcase of the software world – pack your apps in Docker containers and they run anywhere, no fuss about “but it works on my machine!”
   

   
   


7. 
   

   Git

   
   

   
   Ah, the grand tapestry of code - Git is the loom on which software development weaves its rich history. Forget "Did I save that version?" nightmares; Git's your time-traveling sidekick, snapshotting your genius at every stage. Collaborate, branch out, merge - it's your code's very own choose-your-own-adventure.
   

   
   


8. 
   

   Ansible/Terraform

   
   

   
   If you’ve ever wished for an army of robot minions to set up your infrastructure, Ansible and Terraform are your genie in a bottle. These IaC wizards cast spells (in the form of playbooks and modules) that poof! servers and services into existence. An ode to the lazy admin, for sure – they make repetitive setup tasks disappear cooler than a street magician.
   

   
   


9. 
   

   ELK Stack

   
   

   
   The Sherlock Holmes of the logging universe, the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), wears a deerstalker cap and "elementary's" its way through gobs of logs. Cross-reference it with Prometheus, and you’re a truth-seeking ninja, blending metrics and logs to solve performance mysteries with moves smoother than a jazz solo.
   

   
   


10. 
    

    Node Exporter

    
    

    
    The snitch among the tech – Node Exporter tattles on your servers, squealing every little detail from CPU usage to disk space. It’s like having a nanny cam on your hardware, making sure they play nice while you’re out and about. Combine it with Prometheus, and you’ve got the full scoop on your infrastructure's bedtime stories.