prometheus

Introduction In distributed systems, cascading failures are one of the most devastating failure modes. When a downstream service becomes slow or unresponsive, upstream services can exhaust their resources waiting for responses, causing a domino effect that brings down entire systems. The 2017 AWS S3 outage, which cascaded across multiple services and lasted nearly four hours, demonstrated how a single service failure can ripple through interconnected systems. Circuit breakers act as automatic safety switches that prevent cascading failures by detecting when a service is unhealthy and temporarily blocking requests to it.

Hassle-Free Prometheus on Bare Metal Monitoring bare metal infrastructure with Prometheus is notoriously challenging. Unlike cloud environments with built-in service discovery, bare metal deployments require manual configuration of scrape targets. Every time you add a server, you must update Prometheus configs, manage TLS certificates, and ensure exporters are accessible. This manual process is error-prone, time-consuming, and doesn’t scale. In this guide, we’ll build a production-ready service discovery system specifically designed for bare metal Prometheus deployments.