The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.
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promql(native histograms): Introduce exponential interpolation
The linear interpolation (assuming that observations are uniformly
distributed within a bucket) is a solid and simple assumption in lack
of any other information. However, the exponential bucketing used by
standard schemas of native histograms has been chosen to cover the
whole range of observations in a way that bucket populations are
spread out over buckets in a reasonably way for typical distributions
encountered in real-world scenarios.

This is the origin of the idea implemented here: If we divide a given
bucket into two (or more) smaller exponential buckets, we "most
naturally" expect that the samples in the original buckets will split
among those smaller buckets in a more or less uniform fashion. With
this assumption, we end up with an "exponential interpolation", which
therefore appears to be a better match for histograms with exponential
bucketing.

This commit leaves the linear interpolation in place for NHCB, but
changes the interpolation for exponential native histograms to
exponential. This affects `histogram_quantile` and
`histogram_fraction` (because the latter is more or less the inverse
of the former).

The zero bucket has to be treated specially because the assumption
above would lead to an "interpolation to zero" (the bucket density
approaches infinity around zero, and with the postulated uniform usage
of buckets, we would end up with an estimate of zero for all quantiles
ending up in the zero bucket). We simply fall back to linear
interpolation within the zero bucket.

At the same time, this commit makes the call to stick with the
assumption that the zero bucket only contains positive observations
for native histograms without negative buckets (and vice versa). (This
is an assumption relevant for interpolation. It is a mostly academic
point, as the zero bucket is supposed to be very small anyway.
However, in cases where it _is_ relevantly broad, the assumption helps
a lot in practice.)

This commit also updates and completes the documentation to match both
details about interpolation.

As a more high level note: The approach here attempts to strike a
balance between a more simplistic approach without any assumption, and
a more involved approach with more sophisticated assumptions. I will
shortly describe both for reference:

The "zero assumption" approach would be to not interpolate at all, but
_always_ return the harmonic mean of the bucket boundaries of the
bucket the quantile ends up in. This has the advantage of minimizing
the maximum possible relative error of the quantile estimation.
(Depending on the exact definition of the relative error of an
estimation, there is also an argument to return the arithmetic mean of
the bucket boundaries.) While limiting the maximum possible relative
error is a good property, this approach would throw away the
information if a quantile is closer to the upper or lower end of the
population within a bucket. This can be valuable trending information
in a dashboard. With any kind of interpolation, the maximum possible
error of a quantile estimation increases to the full width of a bucket
(i.e. it more than doubles for the harmonic mean approach, and
precisely doubles for the arithmetic mean approach). However, in
return the _expectation value_ of the error decreases. The increase of
the theoretical maximum only has practical relevance for pathologic
distributions. For example, if there are thousand observations within
a bucket, they could _all_ be at the upper bound of the bucket. If the
quantile calculation picks the 1st observation in the bucket as the
relevant one, an interpolation will yield a value close to the lower
bucket boundary, while the true quantile value is close to the upper
boundary.

The "fancy interpolation" approach would be one that analyses the
_actual_ distribution of samples in the histogram. A lot of statistics
could be applied based on the information we have available in the
histogram. This would include the population of neighboring (or even
all) buckets in the histogram. In general, the resolution of a native
histogram should be quite high, and therefore, those "fancy"
approaches would increase the computational cost quite a bit with very
little practical benefits (i.e. just tiny corrections of the estimated
quantile value). The results are also much harder to reason with.

Signed-off-by: beorn7 <beorn@grafana.com>
2024-09-19 14:19:10 +02:00
.circleci Move to github actions (#11235) 2022-09-05 23:09:41 +02:00
.github Bump actions/upload-artifact from 4.3.4 to 4.4.0 (#14775) 2024-09-10 22:14:29 +02:00
cmd Merge pull request #14912 from roidelapluie/notready 2024-09-17 19:40:13 +02:00
config Merge branch 'main' into 3.0-main-sync-24-09-09 2024-09-09 15:44:22 +02:00
discovery chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
docs promql(native histograms): Introduce exponential interpolation 2024-09-19 14:19:10 +02:00
documentation chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
model Fix: optimize .* regexp performance 2024-09-17 12:18:31 +02:00
notifier chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
plugins remove obsolete build tag 2024-01-17 22:26:32 +08:00
prompb regenerate pb files with new comment 2024-08-01 12:41:55 -07:00
promql promql(native histograms): Introduce exponential interpolation 2024-09-19 14:19:10 +02:00
rules chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
scrape chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
scripts makefile: Add support for skipping UI build when prebuilt assets are provided 2024-09-12 12:20:24 +02:00
storage fix rwv2 build write request benchmark, also change how the memory usage (#14925) 2024-09-18 07:04:10 +01:00
template lint: Revamp our linting rules, mostly around doc comments 2024-08-22 17:36:11 +02:00
tracing Include test CA text info (#14699) 2024-08-20 19:41:02 +02:00
tsdb Merge pull request #14505 from marioferh/improve_performance_regex 2024-09-18 09:54:16 +01:00
util chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
web UI: Disallow sub-second zoom as this cause inconsistenices in the X axis in uPlot 2024-09-19 11:51:41 +02:00
.dockerignore Add image build for ppc64le architecture 2020-04-06 18:03:58 -03:00
.gitignore ui build: create requires web/ui/static dir ad hoc 2024-09-09 18:30:00 +02:00
.gitpod.Dockerfile .gitpod.Dockerfile: Auto-fetch Go and goyacc vers 2024-05-24 09:17:18 +03:00
.gitpod.yml fix gitpod by using custome dockerfile and accurate npm ui path 2021-09-27 18:59:41 +02:00
.golangci.yml lint: Revamp our linting rules, mostly around doc comments 2024-08-22 17:36:11 +02:00
.promu.yml Merge branch 'main' into 3.0-main-sync-24-09-09 2024-09-09 15:44:22 +02:00
.yamllint Fix yaml file format and clear ci errors 2024-03-21 11:32:02 +08:00
CHANGELOG.md Make rate possible non-counter annotation consistent (#14910) 2024-09-18 10:21:25 +00:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Update link for referenced CNCF code of conduct (#10664) 2022-05-03 18:32:23 +02:00
CONTRIBUTING.md Merge branch 'main' into mcarl/lint 2024-05-24 14:56:51 +02:00
Dockerfile Remove console static files 2024-09-02 13:59:29 +02:00
go.mod Merge pull request #14531 from prometheus/dependabot/go_modules/github.com/go-zookeeper/zk-1.0.4 2024-09-16 14:30:42 +02:00
go.sum Merge pull request #14531 from prometheus/dependabot/go_modules/github.com/go-zookeeper/zk-1.0.4 2024-09-16 14:30:42 +02:00
LICENSE Clean up license issues. 2015-01-21 20:07:45 +01:00
MAINTAINERS.md remove rfratto as a tsdb/agent maintainer 2024-09-09 11:55:58 -04:00
Makefile makefile: Add support for skipping UI build when prebuilt assets are provided 2024-09-12 12:20:24 +02:00
Makefile.common Add support for running govulncheck (#12654) 2024-09-16 23:13:04 +02:00
NOTICE Add license notice for code adapted from Go 2021-12-05 09:01:52 +01:00
plugins.yml fix: The automatically generated file is inconsistent with the file in the code warehouse 2023-11-20 17:57:43 +08:00
README.md chore: Fix typos (#14868) 2024-09-10 22:32:03 +02:00
RELEASE.md add scripts/get_module_version.sh 2024-08-16 14:23:27 +02:00
SECURITY-INSIGHTS.yml chore: provide OSSF security insight 2024-07-31 06:36:02 +00:00
SECURITY.md fix markdown lint issues (#10591) 2022-05-03 10:59:09 +02:00
VERSION Update CHANGELOG for beta 2024-09-10 10:14:47 +01:00

Prometheus
Prometheus

Visit prometheus.io for the full documentation, examples and guides.

CI Docker Repository on Quay Docker Pulls Go Report Card CII Best Practices OpenSSF Scorecard CLOMonitor Gitpod ready-to-code Fuzzing Status

Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts when specified conditions are observed.

The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are:

  • A multi-dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
  • PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
  • No dependency on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
  • An HTTP pull model for time series collection
  • Pushing time series is supported via an intermediary gateway for batch jobs
  • Targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
  • Multiple modes of graphing and dashboarding support
  • Support for hierarchical and horizontal federation

Architecture overview

Architecture overview

Install

There are various ways of installing Prometheus.

Precompiled binaries

Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the download section on prometheus.io. Using the latest production release binary is the recommended way of installing Prometheus. See the Installing chapter in the documentation for all the details.

Docker images

Docker images are available on Quay.io or Docker Hub.

You can launch a Prometheus container for trying it out with

docker run --name prometheus -d -p 127.0.0.1:9090:9090 prom/prometheus

Prometheus will now be reachable at http://localhost:9090/.

Building from source

To build Prometheus from source code, You need:

Start by cloning the repository:

git clone https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus.git
cd prometheus

You can use the go tool to build and install the prometheus and promtool binaries into your GOPATH:

GO111MODULE=on go install github.com/prometheus/prometheus/cmd/...
prometheus --config.file=your_config.yml

However, when using go install to build Prometheus, Prometheus will expect to be able to read its web assets from local filesystem directories under web/ui/static and web/ui/templates. In order for these assets to be found, you will have to run Prometheus from the root of the cloned repository. Note also that these directories do not include the React UI unless it has been built explicitly using make assets or make build.

An example of the above configuration file can be found here.

You can also build using make build, which will compile in the web assets so that Prometheus can be run from anywhere:

make build
./prometheus --config.file=your_config.yml

The Makefile provides several targets:

  • build: build the prometheus and promtool binaries (includes building and compiling in web assets)
  • test: run the tests
  • test-short: run the short tests
  • format: format the source code
  • vet: check the source code for common errors
  • assets: build the React UI

Service discovery plugins

Prometheus is bundled with many service discovery plugins. When building Prometheus from source, you can edit the plugins.yml file to disable some service discoveries. The file is a yaml-formatted list of go import path that will be built into the Prometheus binary.

After you have changed the file, you need to run make build again.

If you are using another method to compile Prometheus, make plugins will generate the plugins file accordingly.

If you add out-of-tree plugins, which we do not endorse at the moment, additional steps might be needed to adjust the go.mod and go.sum files. As always, be extra careful when loading third party code.

Building the Docker image

The make docker target is designed for use in our CI system. You can build a docker image locally with the following commands:

make promu
promu crossbuild -p linux/amd64
make npm_licenses
make common-docker-amd64

Using Prometheus as a Go Library

Remote Write

We are publishing our Remote Write protobuf independently at buf.build.

You can use that as a library:

go get buf.build/gen/go/prometheus/prometheus/protocolbuffers/go@latest

This is experimental.

Prometheus code base

In order to comply with go mod rules, Prometheus release number do not exactly match Go module releases. For the Prometheus v2.y.z releases, we are publishing equivalent v0.y.z tags.

Therefore, a user that would want to use Prometheus v2.35.0 as a library could do:

go get github.com/prometheus/prometheus@v0.35.0

This solution makes it clear that we might break our internal Go APIs between minor user-facing releases, as breaking changes are allowed in major version zero.

React UI Development

For more information on building, running, and developing on the React-based UI, see the React app's README.md.

More information

  • Godoc documentation is available via pkg.go.dev. Due to peculiarities of Go Modules, v2.x.y will be displayed as v0.x.y.
  • See the Community page for how to reach the Prometheus developers and users on various communication channels.

Contributing

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.