Basic Concepts

This section describes the basic concepts about Prometheus monitoring.

**Table 1** Basic concepts
Concept	Description
Exporter	Collects monitoring data and regulates the data provided for external systems using the Prometheus monitoring function. Hundreds of official or third-party exporters are available. For details, see Exporters.
Target	Target to be captured by a Prometheus probe. A target either exposes its own operation and service metrics or serves as a proxy to expose the operation and service metrics of a monitored object.
Job	Configuration set for a group of targets. Jobs specify the capture interval, access limit, and other behavior for a group of targets.
Prometheus monitoring	Fully interconnects with the open-source Prometheus ecosystem. It monitors various components, and provides multiple out-of-the-box dashboards and fully hosted Prometheus services.
Prometheus instances	Logical units used to manage Prometheus data collection, storage, and analysis.
Prometheus probes	Deployed in the Kubernetes clusters on the user or cloud product side. Prometheus probes automatically discover targets, collect metrics, and remotely write data to databases.
PromQL	Prometheus query language. Supports both query based on specified time spans and instantaneous query, and provides multiple built-in functions and operators. Raw data can be aggregated, sliced, predicted, and combined.
Sample	Value corresponding to a time point in a timeline. For Prometheus monitoring, each sample consists of a value of the float64 data type and a timestamp with millisecond precision.
Alarm rule	Alarm configuration for Prometheus monitoring. An alarm rule can be specified using PromQL.
Tag	A key-value pair that describes a metric.
Service discovery	Automatically discovers collection targets without static configuration. Supports multiple service discovery modes (such as Kubernetes SD, Consul, and Eureka) and exposes collection targets through ServiceMonitor or PodMonitor.
Recording rules	With recording rules, raw data can be processed into new metrics using PromQL to improve query efficiency.
Time series	Consist of metric names and tags. Time series are streams of timestamped values belonging to the same metric and the same set of tagged dimensions.
Remote storage	Self-developed time series data storage component. It supports the remote write protocol related to Prometheus monitoring and is fully hosted by cloud products.
Cloud product monitoring	Seamlessly integrates monitoring data of multiple cloud products. To monitor cloud products, connect them first.
Metrics	Labeled data exposed by targets, which can fully reflect the operation or service status of monitored objects. Prometheus monitoring uses the standard data format of OpenMetrics to describe metrics.