1. The main components are Prometheus, Alertmanager, Pushgateway, Native Instrumented Applications, Exporters, and Visualization solutions.
2. Only Prometheus and scrape targets (whether they are natively instrumented or use exporters) are essential for a Prometheus deployment. However, to have alert routing and management, you also need Alertmanager; Pushgateway is only required in very specific use cases, such as batch jobs; while Prometheus does have basic dashboarding functionality built in, Grafana can be added to the stack as the visualization option.
3. Not all applications are built with Prometheus-compatible instrumentation. Sometimes, no metrics at all are exposed. In these cases, we can rely on exporters.
4. The information should be quickly gathered and exposed in a synchronous operation.
5. Alerts will be sent from both sides of the partition, if possible.
6. The quickest option would be to use the webhook integration.
7. The Prometheus server comes with an expression browser and consoles.