Prometheus target management

Question

We are using prometheus in our production envirment recently. Before we only have 30-40 nodes for each service and those servers not change very often, so we just write it in the prometheus.yml, but right now it become too long to hold in one file and change much frequently then before, so my question is should i use file_sd_config to put those server list out of yml file and change those config files sepearately, or using consul for service discovery(same much easy to handle changes).

I have install 3 nodes consul cluster in data center and as i can see if i change to use consul to slove this problem , i also need to install consul client in each server(node) and define its services info. Is that correct? or does anyone have good advise.

Thanks

Answer 1

I totally advocate the use of a service discovery system. It may be a bit hard to deploy at first but surely it will worth it in the future.

That said, Prometheus comes with a lot of service discovery integrations. It's possible that you don't need a Consul cluster. If your servers are in a cloud provider like AWS, GCP, Azure, Openstack, etc, prometheus are able to autodiscover the instances.

If you keep running with Consul, the answer is yes, the agent must be running in every node. You can also register services and nodes via API but it's easier to deploy the agent.