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.

2 — Kubernetes Discovery

Prometheus's native Kubernetes service discovery role (pod/service/endpoints/ingress) and how the Prometheus Operator's ServiceMonitor/PodMonitor/ScrapeConfig CRDs turn that into a declarative, per-namespace scrape contract.

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.