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Monitoring Python Applications with Prometheus

Professional

You can instrument your Python application with the official Prometheus Python client library and let the Glouton agent scrape its /metrics endpoint.

Install the client library

pip install prometheus-client

Minimal example

The snippet below defines a counter and exposes it on http://localhost:8080/metrics:

import time
from prometheus_client import Counter, start_http_server

requests_total = Counter(
    "myapp_requests_total",
    "Total number of processed requests.",
)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    start_http_server(8080)
    while True:
        requests_total.inc()
        time.sleep(1)

Scrape with Glouton

Configure Glouton to scrape your application by adding the following to /etc/glouton/conf.d/50-prometheus-metrics.conf:

metric:
  prometheus:
    targets:
      - url: "http://localhost:8080/metrics"
        name: "my_python_application"
        allow_metrics:
          - "myapp_requests_total"

Restart the agent to apply the configuration. See Prometheus Monitoring for the full list of options, including Docker label auto-discovery and Kubernetes annotations.

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