Prometheus is a high-performance, time-series-based monitoring system. We wanted to improve the monitoring and alerting for a mature Rails application that relied on a variety of tools, which each had their own limitations. Using Prometheus, we were able to consolidate these tools while gaining deep, user-focused insight about the application performance.
With minor changes to the legacy codebase, we gained insights about Rails performance that were not possible with the existing tools. This allowed us to consolidate metrics collection, improve the quality of alerting, and reduce our dependency on expensive third-party monitoring services.
We also improved the state of the art for MySQL monitoring, which allowed us real-time visibility into database performance problems.
But the story doesn't end here. There are still monitoring challenges to overcome. In the last part of the talk, I will cover future plans and problems that we haven't solved yet.
