* Force buckets in a histogram to be monotonic for quantile estimation
The assumption that bucket counts increase monotonically with increasing
upperBound may be violated during:
* Recording rule evaluation of histogram_quantile, especially when rate()
has been applied to the underlying bucket timeseries.
* Evaluation of histogram_quantile computed over federated bucket
timeseries, especially when rate() has been applied
This is because scraped data is not made available to RR evalution or
federation atomically, so some buckets are computed with data from the N
most recent scrapes, but the other buckets are missing the most recent
observations.
Monotonicity is usually guaranteed because if a bucket with upper bound
u1 has count c1, then any bucket with a higher upper bound u > u1 must
have counted all c1 observations and perhaps more, so that c >= c1.
Randomly interspersed partial sampling breaks that guarantee, and rate()
exacerbates it. Specifically, suppose bucket le=1000 has a count of 10 from
4 samples but the bucket with le=2000 has a count of 7, from 3 samples. The
monotonicity is broken. It is exacerbated by rate() because under normal
operation, cumulative counting of buckets will cause the bucket counts to
diverge such that small differences from missing samples are not a problem.
rate() removes this divergence.)
bucketQuantile depends on that monotonicity to do a binary search for the
bucket with the qth percentile count, so breaking the monotonicity
guarantee causes bucketQuantile() to return undefined (nonsense) results.
As a somewhat hacky solution until the Prometheus project is ready to
accept the changes required to make scrapes atomic, we calculate the
"envelope" of the histogram buckets, essentially removing any decreases
in the count between successive buckets.
* Fix up comment docs for ensureMonotonic
* ensureMonotonic: Use switch statement
Use switch statement rather than if/else for better readability.
Process the most frequent cases first.
* Add max concurrent and current queries engine metrics
This commit adds two metrics to the promql/engine: the
number of max concurrent queries, as configured by the flag, and
the number of current queries being served+blocked in the engine.
This extracts Querier as an instantiateable and closeable object
rather than just defining extending methods of the storage interface.
This improves composability and allows abstracting query transactions,
which can be useful for transaction-level caches, consistent data views,
and encapsulating teardown.
This is based on https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/1997.
This adds contexts to the relevant Storage methods and already passes
PromQL's new per-query context into the storage's query methods.
The immediate motivation supporting multi-tenancy in Frankenstein, but
this could also be used by Prometheus's normal local storage to support
cancellations and timeouts at some point.
For Weaveworks' Frankenstein, we need to support multitenancy. In
Frankenstein, we initially solved this without modifying the promql
package at all: we constructed a new promql.Engine for every
query and injected a storage implementation into that engine which would
be primed to only collect data for a given user.
This is problematic to upstream, however. Prometheus assumes that there
is only one engine: the query concurrency gate is part of the engine,
and the engine contains one central cancellable context to shut down all
queries. Also, creating a new engine for every query seems like overkill.
Thus, we want to be able to pass per-query contexts into a single engine.
This change gets rid of the promql.Engine's built-in base context and
allows passing in a per-query context instead. Central cancellation of
all queries is still possible by deriving all passed-in contexts from
one central one, but this is now the responsibility of the caller. The
central query context is now created in main() and passed into the
relevant components (web handler / API, rule manager).
In a next step, the per-query context would have to be passed to the
storage implementation, so that the storage can implement multi-tenancy
or other features based on the contextual information.
The current separation between lexer and parser is a bit fuzzy when it
comes to operators, aggregators and other keywords. The lexer already
tries to determine the type of a token, even though that type might
change depending on the context.
This led to the problematic behavior that no tokens known to the lexer
could be used as label names, including operators (and, by, ...),
aggregators (count, quantile, ...) or other keywords (for, offset, ...).
This change additionally checks whether an identifier is one of these
types. We might want to check whether the specific item identification
should be moved from the lexer to the parser.
As described in #1898 'go test -race' detects a race in lexer code. This
pacth fixes it and also add '-race' option to test target to prevent
regression.
This was only relevant so far for the benchmark suite as it would
recycle Expr for repetitions. However, the append is unnecessary as
each node is only inspected once when populating iterators, and
population must always start from scratch.
This also introduces error checking during benchmarks and fixes the so
far undetected test errors during benchmarking.
Also, remove a style nit (two golint warnings less…).
See discussion in
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/prometheus-developers/bkuGbVlvQ9g
The main idea is that the user of a storage shouldn't have to deal with
fingerprints anymore, and should not need to do an individual preload
call for each metric. The storage interface needs to be made more
high-level to not expose these details.
This also makes it easier to reuse the same storage interface for remote
storages later, as fewer roundtrips are required and the fingerprint
concept doesn't work well across the network.
NOTE: this deliberately gets rid of a small optimization in the old
query Analyzer, where we dedupe instants and ranges for the same series.
This should have a minor impact, as most queries do not have multiple
selectors loading the same series (and at the same offset).
tl;dr: This is not a fundamental solution to the indexing problem
(like tindex is) but it at least avoids utilizing the intersection
problem to the greatest possible amount.
In more detail:
Imagine the following query:
nicely:aggregating:rule{job="foo",env="prod"}
While it uses a nicely aggregating recording rule (which might have a
very low cardinality), Prometheus still intersects the low number of
fingerprints for `{__name__="nicely:aggregating:rule"}` with the many
thousands of fingerprints matching `{job="foo"}` and with the millions
of fingerprints matching `{env="prod"}`. This totally innocuous query
is dead slow if the Prometheus server has a lot of time series with
the `{env="prod"}` label. Ironically, if you make the query more
complicated, it becomes blazingly fast:
nicely:aggregating:rule{job=~"foo",env=~"prod"}
Why so? Because Prometheus only intersects with non-Equal matchers if
there are no Equal matchers. That's good in this case because it
retrieves the few fingerprints for
`{__name__="nicely:aggregating:rule"}` and then starts right ahead to
retrieve the metric for those FPs and checking individually if they
match the other matchers.
This change is generalizing the idea of when to stop intersecting FPs
and go into "retrieve metrics and check them individually against
remaining matchers" mode:
- First, sort all matchers by "expected cardinality". Matchers
matching the empty string are always worst (and never used for
intersections). Equal matchers are in general consider best, but by
using some crude heuristics, we declare some better than others
(instance labels or anything that looks like a recording rule).
- Then go through the matchers until we hit a threshold of remaining
FPs in the intersection. This threshold is higher if we are already
in the non-Equal matcher area as intersection is even more expensive
here.
- Once the threshold has been reached (or we have run out of matchers
that do not match the empty string), start with "retrieve metrics
and check them individually against remaining matchers".
A beefy server at SoundCloud was spending 67% of its CPU time in index
lookups (fingerprintsForLabelPairs), serving mostly a dashboard that
is exclusively built with recording rules. With this change, it spends
only 35% in fingerprintsForLabelPairs. The CPU usage dropped from 26
cores to 18 cores. The median latency for query_range dropped from 14s
to 50ms(!). As expected, higher percentile latency didn't improve that
much because the new approach is _occasionally_ running into the worst
case while the old one was _systematically_ doing so. The 99th
percentile latency is now about as high as the median before (14s)
while it was almost twice as high before (26s).