Using the Promstack in Serverless Environments?

[Tim Schwenke]

Whenever I have (almost) bare metal servers, VMs or managed container clusters like Kubernetes with GKS / EKS or something like AWS ECS, going for a stack consisting out of Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager etc. is almost a no-brainer for me at this point.

But from time to time I come across serverless applications / platforms that almost exclusively use services provided by the respective cloud environment. May it be AWS, Google or Azure. Here I am wondering:

Can it in your opinion be worth "the hassle" (and when?) to introduce a Promstack into such an environment?

[Stuart Clark]

In my opinion it depends on the surrounding situation.

If the team developing/managing those serverless applications don't touch Prometheus anywhere else, then it might not be worth it, instead using the native cloud provider's solution.

But if there is an extensive Prometheus/Grafana infrastructure elsewhere that probably changes - ideally you don't want multiple different alerting systems or dashboarding systems.

In that case you can do a number of things. If it is just dashboards you have elsewhere using Grafana then you can pull metrics directly from Cloudwatch metrics, etc. If you are using Grafana for alerts that would be covered too.

If you are using Prometheus for alerts then you'd look to use the various cloud exporters, such as the Cloudwatch Exporter to bring the data into Prometheus.