1 — Discovery Mechanisms

How Prometheus finds scrape targets — static configs, file-based service discovery with watched JSON files, and DNS service discovery via SRV/A records — plus validating and reloading configuration safely.

Prometheus

A book-shaped table of contents for Prometheus: monitoring foundations through architecture, data model, instrumentation, service discovery, PromQL, alerting, production operation, PCA certification, and MAANG interview prep — cross-linking existing notes instead of duplicating them.

1 — Discovery Mechanisms

How Prometheus finds scrape targets — static configs, file-based service discovery with watched JSON files, and DNS service discovery via SRV/A records — plus validating and reloading configuration safely.

3 — Cloud Discovery

Cloud-provider and registry-based service discovery — AWS EC2, Azure VM/Container Apps, GCP, Consul, and Eureka — for scraping targets that don't live in a single static inventory.

3 — Prometheus in the Observability Ecosystem

Where Prometheus sits in the CNCF landscape — its pull-based cloud-native origins, its companion projects, and where this book does (and doesn't yet) connect it to the wider stack.

2 — Exporters

What a Prometheus exporter is, installing Node Exporter as a systemd service, and monitoring the container runtime itself via Docker Engine metrics and cAdvisor.