What core metrics types Prometheus supports?
Answer
Prometheus supports several types of metrics, including:
1. Counter: A monotonically increasing value used for tracking counts of events or samples. Examples include the number of requests processed or the total number of errors encountered.
2. Gauge: A value that can go up or down, such as CPU usage or memory usage. Unlike counters, gauge values can be arbitrary, meaning they can go up and down based on changes in the system being monitored.
3. Histogram: A set of observations or events that are divided into buckets based on their value. Histograms help in analyzing the distribution of a metric, such as request latencies or response sizes.
4. Summary: A summary is similar to a histogram, but instead of buckets, it provides a set of quantiles for the observed values. Summaries are useful for monitoring the distribution of request latencies or response sizes over time.
Prometheus also supports various functions and operators for aggregating and manipulating metrics, such as sum, max, min, and rate. These features make it a powerful tool for monitoring and alerting on system metrics.