# Overview ![rw-book-cover](https://prometheus.io/assets/favicons/android-chrome-192x192.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Prometheus]] - Full Title: Overview - Category: #articles - Summary: Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool used by many companies and organizations since 2012. It collects metrics as time series data with optional labels and has features like a multi-dimensional data model and a flexible query language. The system works well for numeric time series monitoring in machine-centric and service-oriented architectures, providing reliability during outages. - URL: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/ ## Highlights - [Prometheus](https://github.com/prometheus) is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com). Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k31psz07n03544r1npmwc9gr)) - It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36sj411t723d7dhhzrby7fb)) - Metrics play an important role in understanding why your application is working in a certain way. Lets assume you are running a web application and find that the application is slow. You will need some information to find out what is happening with your application. For example the application can become slow when the number of requests are high. If you have the request count metric you can spot the reason and increase the number of servers to handle the load. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36szqg6h35pfvhh84n32vxt)) - [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) or other API consumers can be used to visualize the collected data. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36stsj68vjyrqe7f4nyj90z)) - Prometheus is designed for reliability, to be the system you go to during an outage to allow you to quickly diagnose problems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36sv92r9ag1w811mz2z5xm3)) - Prometheus values reliability. You can always view what statistics are available about your system, even under failure conditions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36svsj6k6xjgarmc7mkzkhv))