Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It collects and stores metrics as time series data. The metric information is stored with the timestamp at which it was collected and optional key-value pairs called labels.
vRealize Operations can retrieve the metrics directly from Prometheus with the help of exporters running on the Kubernetes cluster. vRealize Operations supports metrics collection for the following Kubernetes services: Namespace, Nodes, Pods, and Containers with the Prometheus integration.
Prometheus can be primarily deployed in two ways – in cluster or a separate instance that runs outside the cluster. To set up the Prometheus server, see Setting up the Prometheus Server. Kubernetes distributions like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Open Shift, for example, are packaged with Prometheus. If you would like to use the packaged instance, follow the instructions in the respective documentation to set up the Prometheus server.
Prometheus uses basic auth to authenticate access to the server. The credentials to the server will be required while configuring vRealize Operations to integrate with Prometheus. In the case of OpenShift, a token based auth mechanism is used to authenticate access to Prometheus. In this case, vRealize Operations will not be able to access the Prometheus server directly. An Nginx server will be required to act as a layer before the Prometheus server.
