A beginner-friendly introduction to Prometheus

When I started out as a beginner understanding what are metrics, why is Prometheus used was something difficult for me to understand . After spending a lot of time and learning from the material out there I created something that I wish I had when I started learning Prometheus.<p>PS: This is my first tutorial kind of material, open to feedback on how to improve.

I wonder if it should be used at all for beginners and smaller teams. I thought it is something like the new industry standard but even to get it running in production is not trivial and had the feeling this is something for teams who are deeply committed to monitoring and developing their own metrics, views and alarms.<p>My conclusion is the majority (or at least smaller teams) are maybe better served with something like Datadog. It&#x27;s cheaper as long as you don&#x27;t have a high number of machines. Speaking of that I&#x27;m still missing the easy middle ground of monitoring which is modern, easy to use and works for a higher number of machines (and even something like Docker Swarm).

This doesn’t seem to touch the subject of Promgen (or other Prometheus configuration management software that I’m not aware of). Configuring it via yaml files, especially the alerts in alert manager and queries in the sql exporter, requires more steps than I’d like to do. Any recommendations on how to manage Prometheus configs? Especially having multiple Prometheus instances where the master node scraps all the data from other nodes

Are there any good push based monitoring alternative to Prometheus.