What is client_golang?

prometheus/client_golang — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-26

★ 5,961GoAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Prometheus Go client))
    Metric types
      Counters
      Gauges
      Histograms
      Summaries
    What it does
      Record app metrics
      Serve HTTP endpoint
      Query Prometheus API
    Setup
      Go module import
      Register metrics
      HTTP handler serve
    Audience
      Go developers
      DevOps engineers

mindmap root((Prometheus Go client)) Metric types Counters Gauges Histograms Summaries What it does Record app metrics Serve HTTP endpoint Query Prometheus API Setup Go module import Register metrics HTTP handler serve Audience Go developers DevOps engineers

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Instrument a Go web server to track request counts, error rates, and latency histograms that Prometheus scrapes automatically.

USE CASE 2

Add a gauge metric to a Go background worker to track queue depth and alert when it exceeds a threshold.

USE CASE 3

Write a Go program that queries a running Prometheus server's API to retrieve and display stored time-series data.

USE CASE 4

Expose a /metrics HTTP endpoint in your Go app so an existing Prometheus deployment can collect and graph your custom metrics.

What is it built with?

GoHTTPPrometheus

How does it compare?

	prometheus/client_golang	foxcpp/maddy	nilsherzig/llocalsearch
Stars	5,961	5,960	5,955
Language	Go	Go	Go
Setup difficulty	moderate	hard	moderate
Complexity	3/5	4/5	3/5
Audience	ops devops	ops devops	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires a running Prometheus server to scrape the metrics endpoint your app exposes.

So what is it?

This is the official Go library for adding Prometheus monitoring to your own applications. Prometheus is a widely used system for collecting and querying numeric measurements over time, things like how many requests your server handled, how long they took, or how much memory your app is using. This library gives Go developers the tools to record those numbers inside their code and expose them in the format Prometheus expects. The library has two distinct parts. The first is an instrumentation package that you add to your Go application's source code. It provides counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries, which are the four standard metric types Prometheus understands. You register metrics, update them as your code runs, and the library handles formatting and serving them over HTTP so a Prometheus server can scrape them on a schedule. The second part is an API client that lets a Go program talk to a Prometheus server directly. You can use it to write applications that query stored time-series data, run expressions against it, and retrieve results programmatically. This client is marked as experimental, meaning its interface may change without the version number signaling a breaking change. The library targets the two most recent major Go releases. It follows semantic versioning for its stable parts, but some newer APIs are marked experimental and may change independently. A v2 redesign has been in progress, an early attempt lives in a separate branch, and a preview of the new API style is available inside the current 1.x release under a special namespace. This is part of the official Prometheus project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The README points to the Prometheus website for guides on how to instrument a typical Go application, and a set of example programs lives in the repository itself for quick reference.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Add a Prometheus counter and histogram to my Go HTTP handler so I can track request count and latency per route.

Prompt 2

Set up a /metrics endpoint in my Go app using prometheus/client_golang so Prometheus can scrape it every 15 seconds.

Prompt 3

Write a Go program using the Prometheus API client to query the total HTTP requests metric from the last hour.

Prompt 4

Show me how to register a custom gauge in my Go service that tracks the number of active database connections.

Prompt 5

Help me add Prometheus instrumentation to a Go gRPC server to track per-method request counts and error rates.

Frequently asked questions