prometheus/README.md

Prometheus

Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus! A new kid is in town.

Prometheus is a generic time series collection and computation server that is useful in the following fields:

• Industrial Experimentation / Real-Time Behavioral Validation / Software Release Qualification
• Econometric and Natural Sciences
• Operational Concerns and Monitoring

The system is designed to collect telemetry from named targets on given intervals, evaluate rule expressions, display the results, and trigger an action if some condition is observed to be true.

TODO: The above description is somewhat esoteric. Rephrase it into something that tells normal people how they will usually benefit from using Prometheus.

Install

There are various ways of installing Prometheus.

Precompiled packages

We plan to provide precompiled binaries for various platforms and even packages for common Linux distribution soon. Once those are offered, it will be the recommended way of installing Prometheus.

Use make

In most cirumstances, the following should work:

$ make build
$ ./prometheus -config.file=documentation/examples/prometheus.conf

The above requires a number of common tools to be installed, namely curl, git, gzip, hg (Mercurial CLI), sed, xxd. Should you need to change any of the protocol buffer definition files (*.proto), you also need the protocol buffer compiler [protoc](http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/](http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/), v2.5.0 or higher, in your $PATH.

Everything else will be downloaded and installed into a staging environment in the .build sub-directory. That includes a Go development environment of the appropriate version.

The Makefile offers a number of useful targets. Some examples:

• make test runs tests.
• make tarball creates a tarball with the binary for distribution.
• make race_condition_run compiles and runs a binary with the race detector enabled. To pass arguments when running Prometheus this way, set the ARGUMENTS environment variable (e.g. ARGUMENTS=-config.file=./prometheus.conf make race_condition_run).

Use your own Go development environment

Using your own Go development environment with the usual tooling is possible, too, but you have to take care of various generated files (usually by running make in the respective sub-directory):

• Compiling the protocol buffer definitions in config (only if you have changed them).
• Generating the parser and lexer code in rules (only if you have changed parser.y or lexer.l).
• The files.go blob in web/blob, which embeds the static web content into the binary.

Furthermore, the build info (see build_info.go) will not be populated if you simply run go build. You have to pass in command line flags as defined in Makefile.INCLUDE (see ${BUILDFLAGS}) to do that.

More information

• The source code is periodically indexed: Prometheus Core.
• You will find a Travis CI configuration in .travis.yml.
• All of the core developers are accessible via the Prometheus Developers Mailinglist and the #prometheus channel on irc.freenode.net.

Contributing

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.