The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.
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Julius Volz 740d448983 Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code.
So far we've been using Go's native time.Time for anything related to sample
timestamps. Since the range of time.Time is much bigger than what we need, this
has created two problems:

- there could be time.Time values which were out of the range/precision of the
  time type that we persist to disk, therefore causing incorrectly ordered keys.
  One bug caused by this was:

  https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/367

  It would be good to use a timestamp type that's more closely aligned with
  what the underlying storage supports.

- sizeof(time.Time) is 192, while Prometheus should be ok with a single 64-bit
  Unix timestamp (possibly even a 32-bit one). Since we store samples in large
  numbers, this seriously affects memory usage. Furthermore, copying/working
  with the data will be faster if it's smaller.

*MEMORY USAGE RESULTS*
Initial memory usage comparisons for a running Prometheus with 1 timeseries and
100,000 samples show roughly a 13% decrease in total (VIRT) memory usage. In my
tests, this advantage for some reason decreased a bit the more samples the
timeseries had (to 5-7% for millions of samples). This I can't fully explain,
but perhaps garbage collection issues were involved.

*WHEN TO USE THE NEW TIMESTAMP TYPE*
The new clientmodel.Timestamp type should be used whenever time
calculations are either directly or indirectly related to sample
timestamps.

For example:
- the timestamp of a sample itself
- all kinds of watermarks
- anything that may become or is compared to a sample timestamp (like the timestamp
  passed into Target.Scrape()).

When to still use time.Time:
- for measuring durations/times not related to sample timestamps, like duration
  telemetry exporting, timers that indicate how frequently to execute some
  action, etc.

*NOTE ON OPERATOR OPTIMIZATION TESTS*
We don't use operator optimization code anymore, but it still lives in
the code as dead code. It still has tests, but I couldn't get all of them to
pass with the new timestamp format. I commented out the failing cases for now,
but we should probably remove the dead code soon. I just didn't want to do that
in the same change as this.

Change-Id: I821787414b0debe85c9fffaeb57abd453727af0f
2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
.build Revert "Revert "Merge pull request #317 from prometheus/fix/miekg-dns-for-srv"" 2013-09-10 17:48:05 +02:00
coding Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
config Trivial regeneration of config proto (wasn't regenerated with new comments). 2013-10-10 20:58:30 +02:00
documentation/examples Fix /metrics endpoint in sample config. 2013-10-28 08:03:58 +01:00
model Update "build" -> ".build" in remaining Makefiles. 2013-06-26 16:09:37 +02:00
notification Add alert-expression console links to notifications. 2013-08-20 15:45:41 +02:00
retrieval Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
rules Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
stats Add debug timers to instant and range queries. 2013-06-05 18:32:54 +02:00
storage Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
tools Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
utility Add a check for metrics directory existence. 2013-10-22 20:54:34 +02:00
web Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
.gitignore More updates for first time users. 2013-10-22 20:54:43 +02:00
.pkgignore Make prometheus build on bazooka repo manager 2013-06-13 16:31:33 +02:00
.travis.yml Trailing build system cleanups. 2013-06-13 15:38:03 +02:00
build_info.go Implement batch database sample curator. 2013-04-27 17:38:18 +02:00
CONTRIBUTING.md moved CONTRIBUTING.md to top of repo; link to CONTRIBUTING.md in README.md 2013-10-23 16:21:35 -04:00
CONTRIBUTORS.md Update community documentation. 2013-03-28 10:46:41 +01:00
Dockerfile Fix entrypoint and use base image 2013-08-12 11:19:35 +02:00
LICENSE Address outstanding comments from PR/47 and other cleanups. 2013-02-07 11:38:01 +01:00
main.go Use custom timestamp type for sample timestamps and related code. 2013-12-03 09:11:28 +01:00
Makefile Allow overriding url to fetch go from by env var 2013-09-04 15:48:23 +02:00
Makefile.INCLUDE Upgrade to LevelDB 1.14.0 to fix LevelDB bugs. 2013-12-03 09:07:15 +01:00
MANIFEST Add MANIFEST listing 3rd party libs and versions. 2013-04-09 13:31:56 +02:00
README.md Merge changes I53a24c06,Ibe1def5c,Ife68c9c6,Ia3284a90 2013-10-24 13:03:10 +02:00
tests-for-die-in-a-fire-travis.sh Remove gvm on travis. 2013-06-13 14:36:00 +02:00

Prometheus

Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus! A new kid is in town.

Prometheus is a generic time series collection and computation server that is useful in the following fields:

  • Industrial Experimentation / Real-Time Behavioral Validation / Software Release Qualification
  • Econometric and Natural Sciences
  • Operational Concerns and Monitoring

The system is designed to collect telemetry from named targets on given intervals, evaluate rule expressions, display the results, and trigger an action if some condition is observed to be true.

Prerequisites

If you read below in the Getting Started section, the build infrastructure will take care of the following things for you in most cases:

  1. Go 1.1.
  2. LevelDB: https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/.
  3. Protocol Buffers Compiler: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/.
  4. goprotobuf: the code generator and runtime library: http://code.google.com/p/goprotobuf/.
  5. Levigo, a Go-wrapper around LevelDB's C library: https://github.com/jmhodges/levigo.
  6. GoRest, a RESTful style web-services framework: http://code.google.com/p/gorest/.
  7. Prometheus Client, Prometheus in Prometheus https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang.
  8. Snappy, a compression library for LevelDB and Levigo http://code.google.com/p/snappy/.

Getting Started

For basic help how to get started:

  • The source code is periodically indexed: Prometheus Core.
  • For UNIX-like environment users, please consult the Travis CI configuration in .travis.yml and Makefile.
  • All of the core developers are accessible via the Prometheus Developers Mailinglist.

General

For first time users, simply run the following:

$ make
$ ARGUMENTS="-configFile=documentation/examples/prometheus.conf" make run

${ARGUMENTS} is passed verbatim into the makefile and thusly Prometheus as $(ARGUMENTS). This is useful for quick one-off invocations and smoke testing.

If you run into problems, try the following:

$ SILENCE_THIRD_PARTY_BUILDS=false make

Upon having a satisfactory build, it's possible to create an artifact for end-user distribution:

$ make package
$ find build/package

build/package will be sufficient for whatever archiving mechanism you choose. The important thing to note is that Go presently does not staticly link against C dependency libraries, so including the lib directory is paramount. Providing LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH in a scaffolding shell script is advised.

Problems

If at any point you run into an error with the make build system in terms of its not properly scaffolding things on a given environment, please file a bug or open a pull request with your changes if you can fix it yourself.

Please note that we're explicitly shooting for stable runtime environments and not the latest-whiz bang releases; thusly, we ask you to provide ample architecture and release identification remarks for us.

Testing

$ make test

Packaging

$ make package

Race Detector

Go 1.1 includes a race detector which can be enabled at build time. Here's how to use it with Prometheus (assumes that you've already run a successful build).

To run the tests with race detection:

$ GORACE="log_path=/tmp/foo" go test -race ./...

To run the server with race detection:

$ go build -race .
$ GORACE="log_path=/tmp/foo" ./prometheus

Build Status

Contributing

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache License 2.0