Prometheus

PromQL stands for Prometheus Query Language. This post is about using PromQL in Cloud Monitoring. PromQL provides an alternative to the Metrics Explorer menu-driven builder and Monitoring Query Language (MQL) interfaces for exploring metrics, creating charts and alerts. Google Cloud introduced support for PromQL at the same time as Managed Service for Prometheus. Later, support for PromQL was introduced in Monitoring alert management. Practically it means that you can use PromQL instead of Monitoring Query Language (or MQL) to query Cloud Monitoring metrics in the Metrics Explorer, in custom dashboard configurations, and in alert management.

Production systems are being monitored for reliability and performance tracking to say the least. Monitored metrics ‒ a set of measurements that are related to a specific attribute of a system being monitored, are first captured in the executing code of the system and then are ingested to the monitoring backend. The selection of the backend often dictates the methods(s) of ingestion. If you run your workloads on Google Cloud and use self-managed Prometheus server and metric collection, this post will help you to reduce maintenance overhead and some billing costs by utilizing Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus for collecting and storing Prometheus metrics.