Metrics with Prometheus and Grafana

Docs: https://prometheus.io/docs/ | Grafana Cloud Metrics: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/metrics/

PromQL Quick Reference

Instant Vector Selectors

# By metric name
http_requests_total

# Label filter
http_requests_total{job="api-server"}

# Multiple labels (AND)
http_requests_total{job="api-server", method="GET"}

# Regex
http_requests_total{job=~"api.*", status=~"5.."}

# Negative
http_requests_total{status!="200"}

Range Vectors & Rates

# Per-second rate over 5 minutes
rate(http_requests_total[5m])

# Increase over interval
increase(http_requests_total[1h])

# Instant rate (last two samples)
irate(http_requests_total[5m])

# Offset (5 minutes ago)
rate(http_requests_total[5m] offset 5m)

Aggregations

# Sum by label
sum by (job) (rate(http_requests_total[5m]))

# Average
avg by (instance) (node_cpu_seconds_total)

# Top-K
topk(5, rate(http_requests_total[5m]))

# Histogram quantiles
histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))

# Count distinct
count(up{job="api"})

Common Patterns

# Error rate percentage
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
  / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) * 100

# Saturation (CPU usage %)
100 - (avg by(instance) (irate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100)

# Memory usage
node_memory_MemTotal_bytes - node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes

# Predict disk full (linear extrapolation)
predict_linear(node_filesystem_free_bytes[6h], 24*3600) < 0

Alerting Rules

Prometheus Alerting Rule

groups:
  - name: api_alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: |
          sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
            / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) > 0.05
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "High 5xx error rate ({{ $value | humanizePercentage }})"

Alertmanager Routing

# alertmanager.yml
route:
  receiver: default
  group_by: [alertname, job]
  group_wait: 30s
  group_interval: 5m
  routes:
    - match:
        severity: critical
      receiver: pagerduty
    - match:
        severity: warning
      receiver: slack

receivers:
  - name: pagerduty
    pagerduty_configs:
      - service_key: "<key>"
  - name: slack
    slack_configs:
      - channel: "#alerts"
        api_url: "<webhook_url>"
  - name: default
    email_configs:
      - to: "oncall@example.com"

Validate Alerting Configuration

promtool check rules rules.yml
amtool check-config alertmanager.yml
amtool config routes test --config.file=alertmanager.yml severity=critical

Recording Rules

Pre-compute expensive PromQL for dashboard performance:

groups:
  - name: api_rules
    interval: 1m
    rules:
      - record: job:http_requests:rate5m
        expr: sum by (job) (rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
      - record: job:http_request_duration_seconds:p99
        expr: histogram_quantile(0.99, sum by (job, le) (rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])))

Deploy and Verify Recording Rules

# 1. Validate rule syntax
promtool check rules rules/recording.yml

# 2. Reload Prometheus (after adding to rule_files in prometheus.yml)
curl -X POST http://localhost:9090/-/reload

# 3. Verify rules are active
curl -s http://localhost:9090/api/v1/rules | jq '.data.groups[].rules[] | {name, health}'

Metrics Drilldown (Grafana 12+)

Queryless Prometheus exploration — browse metrics without writing PromQL. Navigate to Explore > Metrics Drilldown or use <grafana-url>/a/grafana-metricsdrilldown-app. Provides metric search with label breakdown, smart segmentation for anomaly detection, auto-visualization, and telemetry pivoting from metrics to related logs and traces.

Resources

• PromQL Reference
• Grafana Cloud Metrics
• Metrics Drilldown App
• Grafana Alerting
• Grafana Mimir