Why is the Prometheus Agent Mode So Great?

Prometheus has included a new capability in the 2.32.0 release to optimize the single pane of glass approach

From the new upcoming release of Prometheus v2.32.0, we will have an important new feature at our disposal: the Agent Mode. And there is a fantastic blog post announcing this feature from our of the rockstar from the Prometheus team: Bartlomiej Plotka, that I recommend reading. I will add a reference section at the end of the article. I will try to summarise some of the most relevant points here.

Another post about Prometheus, the most critical monitoring system in nowadays cloud-native architectures, has its inception in the Borgmon monitoring system created by Google in ancient times (around the 2010–2014 period).

Based on this importance, its usage has been growing incredibly and making its relationship with the Kubernetes ecosystem stronger. We have reached a point that Prometheus is the default option for monitoring in pretty much any scenario that has a Kubernetes workload related to it; some examples are the ones shown below:

Because of this popularity and growth, many different use-cases have raised some improvements that can be done. Some of them are related to specific use-cases such as edge deployment or providing a global view, or a single pane of glass.

Until now, if I have several Prometheus deployments, monitor a specific subset of your workloads because of their resides on different networks or because there are various clusters, you can rely on the remote write capability to aggregate that into a global view approach.

Remote Write is a capability that has existed in Prometheus since its inception. The metrics that Prometheus is scraping can be sent automatically to a different system using their integrations. This can be configured for all the metrics or just a subset. But even with all of these, they are…

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