Suggestions for getting started with Prometheus

[Pranav Srivastav]

Hello Sir, I am new comer to the open source environment , and I am really interested in this project . I am  familiar with Java programming and Data Structures and algorithms .

Can you please suggest me how do i get started with contribution to this project?

Or if you can point me to some resources to learn the prerequisites, it would be truly helpful.

I would also like to ask whether I should start with documentation first rather than the technical stuff, your suggestion would be really worthy.

Thanks.

[Brian Candler]

There are many ways to contribute to open source projects: improving documentation, submitting accurate and detailed bug reports, helping users in the community, as well as submitting code and test cases.

If you want to code, then probably your first step is to *deploy* Prometheus in your environment, understand its philosophy, find some limitation that you come across, discuss it with the community, and work on that - in other words, "scratch your own itch".

If you're working on the Prometheus core, this is written in the Go language, so you'd need to get to grips with that.  However, Prometheus includes a wider ecosystem of components including clients, exporters and remote databases, and these are written in a wide variety of languages.  Maybe you'll want to work on one of those, or create a completely new client or exporter for a use case which isn't catered for yet.  I'd say that's a really good place to start.

Good luck!

[Pranav Srivastav]

Thank you Brian for the help.

" Maybe you'll want to work on one of those, or create a completely new client or exporter for a use case which isn't catered for yet.  I'd say that's a really good place to start."

can you please elaborate this .

[Brian Candler]

Prometheus gathers data by talking to exporters.  It makes HTTP requests to gather metrics; the exporter accepts the HTTP request and returns its metrics in a simple format.

There are some exporters released by the Prometheus project itself (e.g. node_exporter, windows_exporter, snmp_exporter, blackbox_exporter), and others released by third parties for gathering data from other sources.  If you are trying to gather data from some system or service that doesn't already have an exporter, you could write your own - or if it's an application, you could add an exporter to the application itself.

"Clients" are the libraries which help you write exporters.  You can find a list of known ones here.