This is a new category of article that falls under "RARE software architecture" special blog series. As its name implies, it deals with topics related to RARE/freeRouter software / Monitoring.

Overview

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan that is credited mankind creation by stealing Fire from Gods and by giving it to human. In the RARE context, Prometheus is a the software from prometheus.io project. It became very popular in the IT industry as it is very simple to implement/configure while providing a great number of metrics without impacting application performance. It is heavily used in microservices environment such as docker and Kubernetes. The mythological reference gives us an indication of how Prometheus is operating. At a constant rate, Prometheus metric collector or server is stealing metrics from Prometheus agent. All the stolen metrics are then consolidated in Time Series database ready to be poured to a queueing system for proper visualization. 

Before going further, allow me a brief digression by sharing with you a small anecdote that led leds to this ongoing work related to network monitoring for RARE. As mentioned previously, our focus is to elaborate RARE/freeRouter solution the possibility to be monitored in an operational environment. In that context, we started with the implementation of a lightweight SNMP stack that provided relevant result via SNMP tools like LibreNMS. This is great for organisation that wouldn’t want invest time on anything but SNMP.

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