Building and deploying highly scalable, distributed applications in the ever-changing landscape of software development is only half the journey. The other half is monitoring your application states and instances while recording accurate metrics. There are moments when you wish to check how many resources are being consumed, how many files are under access by the specialized process, etc. These metrics provide valuable insights into our tech stack execution and management.

Prometheus is a platform for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting. The Prometheus project is free, open-source, and available on GitHub. Originally developed at SoundCloud, Prometheus became a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016, alongside other popular frameworks such as Kubernetes. The core of the project is the Prometheus server, which acts as the system’s “brain” by collecting various metrics and storing them in a time-series database.

Throughout the software development process, engineers can use a number of methods and tools to ensure their code is efficient. When using Go, for example, there are built-in tools, including those for benchmarking and CPU/memory profiling, to check how efficiently code will run. Engineers can also run unit tests to validate code quality.