Prometheus was designed to be run as a single server. This approach will allow you to handle thousands of targets and millions of time series but, as you scale, you might find yourself in a situation where this just is not enough. This chapter tackles this necessity and clarifies how to scale Prometheus through sharding. However, sharding makes having a global view of the infrastructure harder. To address this, we will also go through the advantages and disadvantages of sharding, how federation comes into the picture, and, lastly, introduce Thanos, a component that was created by the Prometheus community to address some of the issues presented.

In brief, the following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Test environment for this chapter
• Scaling with the help of sharding
• Having a global view using federation
• Using Thanos to mitigate Prometheus shortcomings at scale