Get the Skills You Need to Monitor Systems and Services with Prometheus

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Open source software isn’t just transforming technology infrastructure around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. From Linux to OpenStack to Kubernetes, employers have called out significant skills gaps that make it hard for them to find people fluent with cutting-edge tools and platforms. The Linux Foundation not only offers self-paced training options for widely known tools and platforms, such as Linux and Git, but also offers options specifically targeting the rapidly growing cloud computing ecosystem. The latest offering in this area is Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus (LFS241).

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database that is especially well suited for monitoring dynamic cloud environments. It contains a powerful query language and data model in addition to integrated alerting and service discovery support. The new course is specifically designed for software engineers and systems administrators wanting to learn how to use Prometheus to gain better insights into their systems and services.

Why is monitoring so crucial for today’s cloud stacks and environments? Because the metrics these monitoring tools provide allow administrators to see and anticipate potential problems, keep performance tuned, and more. Monitoring tools like Prometheus can also generate automated alerts, helping administrators respond to issues in real time.

The Site Reliability Engineering book covering Google’s key site reliability tools notes: “The idea of treating time-series data as a data source for generating alerts is now accessible to everyone through open source tools like Prometheus.”

As is true for most monitoring tools, Prometheus provides detailed and rich dashboard views of system and platform performance. Prometheus is also 100 percent open source and community-driven. All components are available under the Apache 2 License on GitHub.

Announced in November, this training course includes 20 to 25 hours of course material covering many of the tool’s major features, best practices, and use cases. Students will be able to monitor their systems and services effectively with Prometheus upon completion on this course. This course covers the following topics:

  • Prometheus architecture

  • Setting up and using Prometheus

  • Monitoring core system components and services

  • Basic and advanced querying

  • Creating dashboards

  • Instrumenting services and writing third-party integrations

  • Alerting

  • Using Prometheus with Kubernetes

  • Advanced operational aspects

Hands-on training makes a big difference, and this course contains 55 labs that can be completed locally on a VM or in the cloud. What do you need in terms of prerequisites? Participants should have basic experience with Linux/Unix system administration and common shell commands, as well as some development experience in Go and/or Python and working with Kubernetes.

“Adoption of the Prometheus monitoring system is growing rapidly, leading to demand for more talent qualified to work with this technology, which is why we decided now is the time to develop this course,” said Clyde Seepersad, General Manager, Training & Certification, The Linux Foundation. “With content developed by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which hosts Prometheus, and Julius Volz, one of the founders of the project, there is no better option than LFS241 for learning the ins and outs of this solution.”

Interested in finding out more about Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus (LFS241)? Information and enrollment options for this $199 course are found here.