Contributing to Prometheus: An Open Source Tutorial

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Recently adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit, focused on supporting the operation of microservices and containers. Like any open source project, it can be augmented with additional capabilities.

Contributing to Prometheus is no different than most other open source endeavors, which, like many projects, welcomes community contributions. Let’s gain better familiarity with the process by augmenting Prometheus’ Alert Manager with a new “history” view.

The first step, naturally, is to check out the contributing guidelines for the specific repository (in this case, Alert Manager‘s).

When electing to contribute to any open source project, you’ll want to ensure that you are capable of wielding the technologies used with the project — in this case, those are Go, AngularJS, SQL, etc.

The AlertManager component handles alerts sent by client applications such as the Prometheus server, carefully de-duplicating, correlating, and routing their notifications to their appropriate receiver (e.g. email, webhook, etc.). Current behavior of this component is only to display actively firing alerts.

Read more on The New Stack