At its core, Prometheus is conceptually simple and easy to operate.

Written in Go

Prometheus is written in Go and the static release binaries are deployable without depending on an external runtime (like the JVM), an interpreter (like Python or Ruby), or shared system libraries.

Independent nodes

Each Prometheus server gathers data and evaluates alerting rules independently from any other Prometheus server and only stores data locally without tight clustering or replication.

Simple HA setup

Although server nodes are independent, you can still create a highly available (HA) setup for alerting by running two identically configured Prometheus servers computing the same alerts. The Alertmanager will then deduplicate notifications based on their label sets:

You can learn more about building highly available Prometheus and Alertmanager setups in our "High Availability for Monitoring and Alerting" training.

Simplicity caveats

Of course large-scale deployments of Prometheus or setups with special needs can still become complex. Prometheus also provides interfaces for solving some of its limitations externally, like durable long-term storage. But the building blocks are simple.