The Gotchas of Building an In-House Observability Platform Using Prometheus
In the era of cloud-native applications and microservices, observability has become a cornerstone of reliable software systems. Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, is often the go-to choice for organizations looking to build their own observability platforms. While Prometheus offers a rich feature set and the allure of customization, building an in-house observability platform is fraught with hidden challenges and costs that are not immediately apparent.
In this blog post, we'll delve into the intricacies of building an in-house observability platform using Prometheus. We'll explore when it makes sense to take on this endeavor, when it might be wiser to opt for alternative solutions, the known and unknown challenges you'll face, the hidden costs involved—including the risks associated with high cardinality metrics—and strategies to mitigate the associated risks.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally developed at SoundCloud. It has become a cornerstone in the cloud-native ecosystem, especially when used in conjunction with Kubernetes. Prometheus excels at collecting time-series data, offering a powerful query language (PromQL), and integrating with various third-party tools.
