Architecture

Client libraries help in pulling metrics from the applications and send it to the Prometheus Server as direct instrumentation.

Exporters

Exporter - A Prometheus exporter is any application that exposes metric data in a format that can be collected (or “scraped”) by the Prometheus server.

For example, Node Exporter runs on a Linux machine and collects a variety of system metrics. It then exposes them to Prometheus.

By default these converted metrics are exposed by the exporter on /metrics path(HTTPS endpoint) of the target.

Data Model

The system collects data samples over time, each of which is a tuple of an UNIX epoch and a float64 value.

(timestamp1, value1), (timestamp2, value2), ...

Ref: https://training.promlabs.com/training/introduction-to-prometheus/prometheus-an-overview/time-series-data-model/