In this chapter, we had the opportunity to understand why service discovery is essential for managing ever-growing infrastructure in a sane way. Prometheus leverages several service discovery options out of the box, which can kick-start your adoption in a very quick and friendly manner. We went through the available options Prometheus provides for service discovery, and showed you what to expect from them. We then stepped into a couple of examples using Consul and Kubernetes to materialize the concepts we exposed previously. Finally, we went through how to integrate a custom service discovery with Prometheus by using the recommended approach and relying on file_sd.

In the next chapter, we'll go through how to scale and federate Prometheus.