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SUNSET NOTICE

We'll be sunsetting this project in the coming months as we focus on a new implementation with additional functionality and better support for new TimescaleDB features (such as compression). You can find the new project at https://github.com/timescale/promscale.

More details can be found in our design document for the new project.

This project will continue only in maintenance mode.

Prometheus metrics for PostgreSQL

pg_prometheus is an extension for PostgreSQL that defines a Prometheus metric samples data type and provides several storage formats for storing Prometheus data.

Related packages to install:

Running from Docker

A PostgreSQL docker image with both pg_prometheus and TimescaleDB installed is available in Docker Hub at timescale/pg_prometheus.

Example usage:

docker run --name pg_prometheus -d -p 5432:5432 timescale/pg_prometheus:latest-pg11 postgres \
      -csynchronous_commit=off

Note that this image inherits from the official postgres image and so all options documented there are applicable to this image as well. Especially important for users that wish to persist data outside of docker volumes is the PGDATA environmental variable and accompanying volume mount.

Installation

Requirements

  • Install PostgreSQL libraries and headers for C language backend development (https://www.postgresql.org/download/)
  • Make sure you have PostgreSQL bin in your PATH and the postgresql-devel package for your version of PostgreSQL before compiling from source

To install from source, do:

make
make install # Might require super user permissions

Edit postgresql.conf to include the pg_prometheus extension:

shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_prometheus'

Start PostgreSQL and install the extension as a superuser using the psql CLI:

CREATE EXTENSION pg_prometheus;

Optionally grant permissions to the database user (prometheus) that will own the Prometheus data:

-- Create the role
CREATE ROLE prometheus WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'secret';

-- Grant access to the schema
GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA prometheus TO prometheus;

This also requires superuser privileges.

Integrating with Prometheus

For quickly connecting Prometheus to pg_prometheus simply connect the Prometheus PostgreSQL adapter to a database that has pg_prometheus installed.

For more technical details, or to use pg_prometheus without Prometheus, read below.

Creating the Prometheus tables.

To create the appropriate Prometheus tables use:

SELECT create_prometheus_table('metrics');

This will create a metrics table for inserting data in the Prometheus exposition format using the Prometheus data type. It will also create a metrics_view to easily query data.

Other supporting tables may also be created depending on the storage format (see below).

Inserting data

With either storage format, data can be inserted in Prometheus format into the main table (e.g. metrics in our running example). Data should be formatted according to the Prometheus exposition format.

INSERT INTO metrics VALUES ('cpu_usage{service="nginx",host="machine1"} 34.6 1494595898000');

Since metrics is a view, and PostgreSQL does not allow COPY to views, we create a specialized table to be the target of copy commands for normalized tables (raw tables could write directly to the underlying _sample table). By default, copy tables have a _copy suffix.

One interesting usage is to scrape a Prometheus endpoint (e.g. http://localhost:8080/metrics) directly (without using Prometheus):

curl http://localhost:8080/metrics | grep -v "^#" | psql -h localhost -U postgres -p 5432 -c "COPY metrics_copy FROM STDIN"

Querying data

The metrics view has the following schema:

  Column |           Type           | Modifiers
 --------+--------------------------+-----------
  time   | timestamp with time zone |
  name   | text                     |
  value  | double precision         |
  labels | jsonb                    |

An example query would be

SELECT time, value
FROM metrics
WHERE time > NOW() - interval '10 min' AND
      name = 'cpu_usage' AND
      labels @> '{ "service": "nginx"}';

Storage formats

Pg_prometheus allows two main ways of storing Prometheus metrics: raw and normalized (the default). With raw, a table simply stores all the Prometheus samples in a single column of type prom_sample. The normalized storage format separates out the labels into a separate table. The advantage of the normalized format is disk space savings when labels are long and repetitive.

Note that the metrics view can be used to query and insert data regardless of the storage format and serves to hide the underlying storage from the user.

Raw format

In raw format, data is stored in a table with one column of type prom_sample. To define a raw table use pass normalized_tables=>false to create_prometheus_table. This will also create appropriate indexes on the raw table. The schema is:

  Column   |           Type           | Modifiers
-----------+--------------------------+-----------
 sample    | prom_sampe               |

Normalized format

In the normalized format, data is stored in two tables. The values table holds the data values with a foreign key to the labels. It has the following schema:

  Column   |           Type           | Modifiers
-----------+--------------------------+-----------
 time      | timestamp with time zone |
 value     | double precision         |
 labels_id | integer                  |

Labels are stored in a companion table called labels (note that metric_name is in its own column since it is always present):

   Column    |  Type   |                          Modifiers
-------------+---------+-------------------------------------------------------------
 id          | integer | not null default nextval('metrics_labels_id_seq'::regclass)
 metric_name | text    | not null
 labels      | jsonb   |

Use with TimescaleDB

TimescaleDB scales PostgreSQL for time-series data workloads (of which metrics is one example). If TimescaleDB is installed, pg_prometheus will use it by default. To install TimescaleDB, follow the instruction here. You can explicitly control whether or not to use TimescaleDB with the use_timescaledb parameter to create_prometheus_table.

For example, the following will force pg_prometheus to use Timescale (and will error out if it isn't installed):

SELECT create_prometheus_table('metrics',use_timescaledb=>true);

Contributing

We welcome contributions to this extension, which like TimescaleDB is released under the Apache2 Open Source License. The same Contributors Agreement applies; please sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) if you're a new contributor.