How does Prometheus gather information about monitored hosts and services?

Prometheus is a monitoring system that gathers metrics from configured targets by scraping metrics HTTP endpoints. These metrics are typically exposed by the monitored applications in a JSON format. Prometheus uses these endpoints to collect the necessary data to monitor the health and performance of the services.

Metrics Exporting: Monitored applications expose metrics at a specified HTTP endpoint.

Scraping: Prometheus scrapes these endpoints to retrieve the metrics.

Data Storage: Retrieved metrics are stored in the Prometheus time-series database for querying and alerting.

References:

Prometheus Documentation - Getting Started

Prometheus Documentation - Metric Types