There are different ways you can use to deploy the Prometheus monitoring tool in your environment. One of the fastest ways to get started is to deploy it as a Docker container. This guide shows you how to quickly set up a minimal Prometheus on your laptop. You can then extend that setup to add a monitoring dashboard, alerting, and authentication.

The Prometheus monitoring tool can store its metrics either locally or remotely. You can configure a remote data store using the remote_write configuration. This article describes the various data store options available as well as how to set up a remote store.

Service discovery (SD) is a mechanism by which the Prometheus monitoring tool can discover monitorable targets automatically. Instead of listing down each and every target to be scraped in the Prometheus configuration, service discovery acts as a source of targets that Prometheus can query at runtime. Service discovery becomes crucial when there are dynamically changing hosts, especially in microservices architectures and environments like Kubernetes.

Runbooks are a key part of incident management and preserve institutional knowledge. They can be used for both incident response as well as routine tasks like db maintenance and generating a complex report. We are mostly focused on incident response runbooks here.