This intensive, hands-on Prometheus for Users course takes Prometheus users from first principles through to advanced timeseries query development and dashboarding. Attendees learn the architecture and configuration of Prometheus, then build fluency with the Prometheus Query Language, or PromQL. From there, they visualize timeseries data in Grafana dashboards powered by PromQL expressions. They also export metrics from their own applications and apply proven alerting best practices.
The course is highly modular and can be delivered as a one, two, or three day session. Each day builds on the skills learned in the previous day. Each module includes a hands-on lab, giving attendees practical experience working with Prometheus and Grafana.
Early modules have attendees explore metric types and build PromQL expressions against real time series before moving into vector aggregation and label-based queries. Later PromQL sessions cover mathematical functions, label replacement and joining, and recording rules that speed up dashboards and alert evaluation. Alerting labs take attendees from a first simple alert through label-based routing. From there they move into the best practices that keep a metric and label naming scheme consistent at scale.
The final day pairs REST API operations with advanced Grafana work, including templated dashboards driven by variables and the Grafana API. Attendees instrument their own code with client libraries and exporters. They then configure Alert Manager for grouping, routing, and throttling so on-call teams see fewer, more meaningful alerts.
Who Should Attend
Technical staff, SRE, devops teams and developers
What Attendees Will Learn
Upon completing Prometheus for Users, attendees will be able to:
- Explain observability concepts and the Prometheus data model
- Visualize time series data using the Grafana web UI
- Query multi-dimensional time series data with PromQL
- Apply PromQL operators, functions, and aggregation
- Create alerts using the Prometheus Query Language
- Apply metric labeling and alerting best practices
- Interact with Prometheus using its REST API
- Build advanced Grafana dashboards with templating
- Instrument applications and use Prometheus exporters
- Configure Alert Manager for grouping, routing, and throttling alerts
Prerequisites
Basic familiarity with microservice architecture, containerization (e.g. Docker, Podman, etc.), and Kubernetes orchestration is helpful.