What are Prometheus and Grafana?

In 2006, mathematician Clive Humby declared that “data is the new oil”. 19 years later, that quote is still extremely accurate. Like oil powering things like transportation, heating, and manufacturing, data is responsible for uncovering insights that fuel important decisions. However, much like oil, data must be refined and filtered before use. The problem is, there’s so much data existing at the current moment and will be generated down the line. It was estimated that 149 zettabytes of data were generated in 2024, with that number expecting a huge increase in the years to come. How are organizations expected to sift through all that data?

Enter Prometheus and Grafana.

Despite names that sound like characters out of Greek mythology, Prometheus and Grafana are two of the leading tools driving the capture, cleansing, and visualization of data. Prometheus takes care of monitoring and data collection and storage, while Grafana creates interpretive insights through visualization.

Though these two services are separate entities first and foremost, they work together symbiotically; they’re the Batman and Robin of data.

What is Prometheus? An In-Depth Look at the Data Collection Monolith

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a god of fire, one who took the fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. This fire manifested itself in technology, knowledge, and other components needed to develop civilization. The Prometheus service not only shares a namesake, but also works towards driving technological expansion through data collection and storage.

Developed at SoundCloud in 2012, Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores time series data. In 2016, Prometheus joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), becoming the 2nd project in this illustrious group after Kubernetes. 

Prometheus offers three main functionalities:

• Data collection and retrieval
• Data storage
• Service discovery

Prometheus orchestrates data collection under a pull-based model, or a system that responds to demands once requested, and not before. Once prompted by a user, Prometheus will scrape data and pull relevant information based on configuration. This data is then stored in one of many databases, providing performance over time. Service discovery thus ensures that when you add data source or instance they’ll be monitored. 

The many features of this open source systems monitoring tool only enhances the service’s relation to these concepts and the total user experience.:

• Dimensional data model with time series identification based on metric names and key-value pairs
• Built in visualization nodes and direct integration with Grafana
• Memory and local storage that supports custom formatting
• Alerts based on PromQL and data information
• Expansive language support and client libraries, supporting service discovery
• Third party integration support

Perhaps the biggest draw to Prometheus is its in-house query language, Prometheus Query Language, or PromQL. The PromQL query is used for retrieving and analyzing time series data, letting users select, aggregate, and manipulate data in real time. This highly flexible query language can be used across a variety of different disciplines, allowing users to perform the simplest of math functions to the most complex dissection of any Prometheus data source. 

‍

On its own, Prometheus is a great option to monitor any aspect of your application. From frontend to backend, servers and hardware, infrastructure, and even microservices, Prometheus lets you take a closer look at your app operations. Outside of data scraping and collection, Prometheus is able to enhance your observability and issue identification and prevention efforts. And because storage servers are largely independent within Prometheus, you no longer have to worry about system-wide errors.

What is Grafana? Enhancing Business Insights through Visualization

If Prometheus is the source of the data, then Grafana is the tool that lets you make sense of the data.

Developed by Grafana Labs, Grafana is an open source data visualization platform that creates charts and graphs from data, unifying sources into dashboards in a single interface. Grafana ingests data from a wide range of sources, letting users query and display data however they see fit in customizable charts.

Grafana has a wide variety of features and supporting apps under its umbrella, with some standout features including: 

• Intuitive and flexible Grafana dashboard
• Customizable visualization options, including heatmaps, graphs, and more
• Seamless source integration
• Anomaly detection alerts and notifications based on user configurations
• Template and variable support, enabling reusable dashboards
• Collaborative and shareable capabilities
• Extensive plugin ecosystem and community support

Grafana is most commonly used within infrastructure monitoring, doing everything from application performance and benchmarking to noting error rates. Outside of this, Grafana is a great tool to use when you’re dealing with a large amount of raw data, or looking to aggregate a large amount of services.

‍

Maximizing Prometheus with Grafana: Benefits and Use Cases

The relationship between Prometheus and Grafana is seamless. Prometheus is used to collect and store metrics and data, Grafana takes that data and visualizes it for user analysis. Grafana even has support for different time series storage options. It’s no wonder that Prometheus is one of the most popular data options for Grafana.

With both tools offering support for integration, using Grafana and Prometheus is a no-brainer. In fact, using both of these tools within your cloud environment can significantly enhance your experience, offering benefits such as:

Enhanced Observability

The difference between your organization and a groundbreaking discovery is data. Together, Prometheus and Grafana enhance your observability and create the best environment for your systems.

Prometheus is able to collect a wide range of data, with Grafana offering powering visualization. Through this combination, users are able to gain greater insight into their system health, understanding everything from CPU and memory usage to even hardware state and cost consumption.

Stronger Monitoring

Prometheus and Grafana paired together offer two degrees of monitoring and alerts, with both services offering anomaly detection on two different fronts. The difference between Grafana and Prometheus is with the state of data they’re dealing with. Grafana offers monitoring for the data that has already been filtered and vetted, ready to be served on a nice chart. Prometheus keeps a close eye on data sources and unfiltered data, also offering monitoring for any aspect of your application.

Both services offer alerts and notifications, allowing you to react to any changes in real time. In addition, using this pair enables users to react to issues faster and even set up stronger preventative measures.

Extreme Growth Prospects

As your application grows, so will Prometheus and Grafana.

With Prometheus’ extremely flexible time series databases and PromQL flexibility and Grafana’s ability to aggregate and visualize large amounts of data, as your application scales, data treatment and storage will grow in tangent.

Outside of the literal sense of growth, both Prometheus and Grafana are open source and backed by huge communities. Product evolutions, new features, and extensive community plugins and integrations are bound to enhance your experience as you scale.

These benefits extend themselves to various expansive use cases for Prometheus and Grafana. Monitoring and observability are critical aspects in any deployment, though some prominent use cases for this combination are:

Kubernetes and Infrastructure Monitoring

Prometheus collects valuable Kubernetes metrics (cluster performance, pod stats, traffic, etc) while Grafana helps users identify performance bottlenecks. This also extends to infrastructure in general.

Application Performance Benchmarking and Tuning

Prometheus identifies areas of improvement and over/underutilization, uncovering performance data in both software and hardware. Grafana turns uncovered data into digestible insights, generating actionable recommendations for optimization.

Resource Planning

Prometheus can be used to uncover resource consumption, costs, and time of high and low consumption. The role Grafana plays involves visualizing this data and identifying bottlenecks of resource consumption and performance, priming teams to prepare for future budgets based on historical trends.

Whether you’re looking at new preventative measures for your system, or looking to save costs down the line by optimizing your resources, Prometheus and Grafana are great tools to enhance your observability and flexibility down the line.

Mobilizing Prometheus and Grafana with Lyrid

What could’ve been two characters in an epic Greek mythology tale are actually tools dedicated to increasing observability and making your systems more transparent. Prometheus and Grafana are toolkits well equipped with scraping and filtering data, then support its visualization for business use. 

At Lyrid, we not only support Prometheus and Grafana capabilities with our platform, but also use both when conducting our application benchmarking. Within our platform, you’ll be able to uncover stats such as:

• CPU and memory usage
• Pod and node usage
• Container compute

And more within your clusters- all within a single pane of glass!

Enhanced observability is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Lyrid. Looking to learn more about our platform, check us out here, or book a demo with one of our product specialists!