M3 and Prometheus: Monitoring at planet scale for everyone

Rob Skillington and ukasz Szczsny explore scaling monitoring, alerting, and configurational complexity for a single view of your applications, databases, infrastructure, and operations across all regions using M3 and Prometheus.

For the past few years, Prometheus has solved many people’s monitoring needs, and it’s exceptional at what it does. Prometheus has exploded in popularity, and now many wish to store more metrics at longer retention and establish a single pane of glass on top of Prometheus for their monitoring needs across regions. M3, first developed at Uber, is an open source metrics platform that you can deploy and run using Kubernetes and Helm that integrates with Prometheus. It can store petabytes of metrics data with replication for high availability in a cost-efficient manner, with compaction-averse time series storage, and an index that can efficiently index and run dimension-based regexp queries on billions of metrics. Rob Skillington and Łukasz Szczęsny use a real-world example to cover how to deploy M3Coordinator and M3DB using the M3 Kubernetes operator and how to connect your Prometheus instances together into a single global monitoring system.