# Metric Sources

Monitoring Service supports metrics from various Promethues compatible metric sources. Selected agents or exporters can push metrics to selected regional endpoint for ingestion. The collected metrics are processed, stored, and made available for querying and visualization.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Note:** You can send Prometheus compatible metrics from anywhere as long as you can reach the service endpoint.
{% endhint %}

Examples provide some suggested and functional Prometheus configurations for our available metric sources.

{% tabs %}
{% tab title="Prometheus" %}
Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit that is designed for reliability and scalability. It is a pull-based system that scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs, either directly or via an intermediary push gateway for short-lived jobs. It stores all scraped samples locally and runs rules over this data to either aggregate and record new time series from existing data or generate alerts. We also recommend you try our [<mark style="color:blue;">Prometheus</mark>](https://github.com/ionos-cloud/observability-services-user-documentation/tree/main/monitoring/examples/prometheus) sample configuration.
{% endtab %}

{% tab title="Grafana Agent" %}
Grafana Agent is an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with configuration inspired by Terraform. It is designed to be flexible, performant, and compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. We also recommend you try our [<mark style="color:blue;">Grafana Agent</mark>](https://github.com/ionos-cloud/observability-services-user-documentation/tree/main/monitoring/examples/grafana-agent) sample configuration.
{% endtab %}

{% tab title="OpenTelemetry" %}
OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics) to help you analyze your software's performance and behavior. We also recommend you try our [<mark style="color:blue;">OpenTelemetry</mark>](https://github.com/ionos-cloud/observability-services-user-documentation/tree/main/monitoring/examples/opentelemetry) sample configuration.
{% endtab %}

{% tab title="FluentBit" %}
FluentBit is a super fast, lightweight, and highly scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. It is the preferred choice for cloud and containerized environments. We also recommend you try our [<mark style="color:blue;">FluentBit</mark>](https://github.com/ionos-cloud/observability-services-user-documentation/tree/main/monitoring/examples/fluentbit) sample configuration. This repository provides a basic example of how to configure FluentBit to send metrics to the Ionos Monitoring Service.
{% endtab %}
{% endtabs %}


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.ionos.com/cloud/observability/monitoring-service/overview/metric-sources.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.