---
title: FAQ
sort_rank: 5
---

# Frequently Asked Questions

## General

### What is Prometheus?
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit
with an active ecosystem. See the [overview](/docs/introduction/overview/).

### How does Prometheus compare against \[other monitoring system\]?

See the [comparison](/docs/introduction/comparison/) page.

### What dependencies does Prometheus have?

The main Prometheus server runs standalone and has no external dependencies.

### Can Prometheus be made highly available?

Yes, run identical Prometheus servers on two or more separate machines.
Identical alerts will be deduplicated by the [Alertmanager](https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager).

The Alertmanager cannot currently be made highly available, but this is a goal.

### What language is Prometheus written in?

Most Prometheus components are written in Go. Some are also written in Java and Ruby.

### How stable are Prometheus features, storage formats, and APIs?

Although Prometheus and many of its ecosystem components are already quite
stable, we will still allow for occasional breaking changes until the
Prometheus server reaches version 1.0.0. These breaking changes will be pointed
out in release announcements for components that already have a proper release
process (like the Prometheus server) or communicated clearly otherwise. After
releasing version 1.0.0, breaking changes will be indicated by increments of
the major version. See also the documentation for [semantic
versioning](http://semver.org/), which we are following.

### Why do you pull rather than push?

Pulling over HTTP offers a number of advantages:

* You can run your monitoring on your laptop when developing changes.
* You can more easily tell if a target is down.
* You can manually go to a target and inspect its health with a web browser.

Overall we believe that pulling is slightly better than pushing, but it should
not be considered a major point when considering a monitoring system.

The [Push vs Pull for Monitoring](http://www.boxever.com/push-vs-pull-for-monitoring)
blog post by Brian Brazil goes into more detail.

For cases where you must push, we offer the [Pushgateway](/docs/instrumenting/pushing/).

### Who wrote Prometheus?

Prometheus was initially started privately by
[Matt T. Proud](http://www.matttproud.com) and
[Julius Volz](http://juliusv.com). The majority of its
development has been sponsored by [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com).

Other companies making active contributions include [Boxever](http://www.boxever.com/)
and [Docker](https://www.docker.com). A full list can be found in the
[CONTRIBUTORS](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.md)
file in each repository.

### What license is Prometheus released under?

Prometheus is released under the
[Apache 2.0](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/master/LICENSE) license.

### What is the plural of Prometheus?

After extensive research it has been determined that the correct plural of
'Prometheus' is 'Prometheis'.

### Can I send alerts?

Yes, with the experimental [Alertmanager](https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager).
[PagerDuty](http://www.pagerduty.com/) and email are supported.

### Can I create dashboards?

Yes, with [PromDash](/docs/visualization/promdash/) and [Console
templates](/docs/visualization/consoles/).

## Instrumentation

### Which languages have instrumentation libraries?

Currently there are client libraries for:

* [Go](https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang)
* [Java or Scala](https://github.com/prometheus/client_java)
* [Ruby](https://github.com/prometheus/client_ruby)

If you are interested in contributing a client library for a new language, see
the [exposition formats](/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/).

### Can I monitor machines?

Yes, the [Node Exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter) exposes
an extensive set of machine-level metrics on Linux such as CPU usage, memory,
disk utilization, filesystem fullness and network bandwidth.

### Can I monitor batch jobs?

Yes, using the [Pushgateway](/docs/instrumenting/pushing/). See also the
[best practices](/docs/practices/instrumentation/#batch-jobs) for monitoring batch
jobs.

### What applications can Prometheus monitor out of the box?

See [exporters for third-party systems](/docs/instrumenting/exporters/).

### Which Java client should I use?

New users are advised to use the
[simpleclient](https://github.com/prometheus/client_java/tree/master/simpleclient).
For more information, see the [comparison](https://github.com/prometheus/client_java/wiki).

### Can I monitor JVM applications via JMX?

Yes, for applications that you cannot instrument directly with the Java client
you can use the [JMX Exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter)
either standalone or as a Java Agent.

### What is the performance impact of instrumentation?

Performance across client libraries and languages may vary. For Java,
[benchmarks](https://github.com/prometheus/client_java/blob/master/benchmark/README.md)
indicate that incrementing a counter/gauge with the Java client will take
12-17ns, depending on contention. This is negligible for all but the most
latency-critical code.

## Troubleshooting

### My server takes a long time to start up and spams the log with copious information about crash recovery.

You are suffering from an unclean shutdown. Prometheus has to shut
down cleanly after a `SIGTERM`, which might take a while for heavily
used servers. If the server crashes or is killed hard (e.g. OOM kill
by the kernel or your runlevel system got impatient while waiting for
Prometheus to shutdown), a crash recovery has to be performed, which
should take less than a minute under normal circumstances. See [crash recovery](/docs/operating/storage/#crash-recovery) for details.

### I am using ZFS on Linux, and the unit test `TestPersistLoadDropChunks` fails. If I run Prometheus despite the failing test, the weirdest things happen.

You have run into a bug of ZFS on Linux. See [issue #484](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/484)
for details. Upgrading to ZFS on Linux v0.6.4 should fix the issue.
