Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) and Cluster Autoscaler (CA) provide essential, yet very rudimentary mechanisms to scale our Pods and clusters. While they do scaling decently well, they do not solve our need to be alerted when there’s something wrong, nor do they provide enough information required to find the cause of an issue. We’ll need to expand our setup with additional tools that will allow us to store and query metrics as well as to receive notifications when there is an issue.

If we focus on tools that we can install and manage ourselves, there is very little doubt about what to use. If we look at the list of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, only two graduated so far (October 2018). Those are Kubernetes and Prometheus. Given that we are looking for a tool that will allow us to store and query metrics and that Prometheus fulfills that need, the choice is straightforward. That is not to say that there are no other similar tools worth considering. There are, but they are all service based. We might explore them later but, for now, we’re focused on those that we can run inside our cluster. So, we’ll add Prometheus to the mix and try to answer a simple question. What is Prometheus?
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