This page outlines the architecture of our monitoring platform, which is built using modular, scalable, and cloud-native components. The system is designed to collect, store, visualize, and alert on telemetry data from distributed services across single or multiple clusters.

🔧 Core Components

Component	Role
Prometheus	Time-series data collector; pulls metrics from targets and sends them to long-term storage (via remote_write).
Grafana	Dashboard and visualization layer for metrics and alert inspection.
Alertmanager	Handles alert notifications based on rules in Prometheus.
VictoriaMetrics / Thanos	Long-term storage backend; supports high performance and scalability.
vmagent / node_exporter / custom exporters	Metric collectors and forwarders from services and nodes.
Consul	Service discovery for dynamic target registration.

🧱 Architecture Layers

1. Data Collection Layer

• Exporters (e.g., node_exporter, redis_exporter, blackbox_exporter)
• vmagent / Prometheus scrape targets
• Dynamic target discovery via Consul or static configs

2. Data Ingestion Layer

• Prometheus scrapes metrics
• Optional: Push via remote_write to VictoriaMetrics / Thanos Receiver
• vmagent acts as gateway in large-scale setups

3. Storage Layer

• Short-term: Prometheus TSDB
• Long-term:
  • VictoriaMetrics Cluster (for high-performance write/read at scale)
  • Thanos with S3/GCS/Object Storage (for federated, HA setups)

4. Query & Visualization Layer

• Grafana dashboards
• Thanos Query (aggregates from sidecars or store APIs)
• VMSelect (VictoriaMetrics cluster query component)

5. Alerting Layer

• Prometheus alert rules
• Alertmanager for routing & deduplication
• Notification channels: Slack, Telegram, Email, Opsgenie, etc.

🌐 Multi-Cluster / Multi-Region Support

• We support scalable observability across multiple Kubernetes clusters or VM regions:
• Centralized Thanos Query aggregates metrics from different clusters
• Cross-cluster alerting handled via unified Alertmanager
• Use of vmagent or Prometheus in each cluster for local collection

🔐 Security & Access Control

• Grafana: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), data source restrictions
• Prometheus/Thanos endpoints: mTLS, basic auth, IP allowlists
• Object storage access via IAM / service accounts