Prometheus

IRONdb supports remote write and read capabilities to provide long-term metric storage for Prometheus deployments. One IRONdb cluster can support many individual Prometheus instances.

Load balancing requests

Both read and write requests to IRONdb can safely go to any node in an IRONdb cluster. To ensure high availability and distribute load, users are encouraged to put a load balancer between the Prometheus nodes and the cluster.

Prometheus Ingestion

IRONdb has native endpoints for accepting remote write data from a Prometheus installation. Once the Prometheus module is enabled, data can be sent to IRONdb by setting the Prometheus remote_write endpoint to:

http://irondbnode:8112/module/prometheus/write/<accountid>/<uuid>

Namespacing

Prometheus data is not namespaced by nature. This can create confusion if different copies of Prometheus have identically named metrics. Inside of IRONdb, we require that all data be namespaced under a UUID. This UUID can be created using uuidgen on a typical UNIX(like) system or via any external tool or website that generates well-formed, non-nil UUIDs. Each distinct set of Prometheus data should have its own UUID. For high-availability in Prometheus it is the recommended pratice to have two copies collecting the same data. While these two instances do not contain the same data, they do represent the same metrics, and so should share a common UUID for their namespace. One may wish to send both of these instances into IRONdb where they simply become more samples in the given metric stream.

All metrics live under a numeric identifier (one can think of this like an account ID). Metric names can only be associated with one "account ID". This allows separate client instances that completely segregate data.

Writing Prometheus Data to IRONdb

To configure a Prometheus instance to write to IRONdb the Prometheus YAML configuration file will need to be updated. The remote_write section's url field should be set to http://irondbnode:8112/module/prometheus/write/<accountid>/<uuid>.

This should look something like:

remote_write:
  - url: "https://irondbnode:8112/module/prometheus/write/1/321b704b-a8ff-44b7-8171-777dc49bc788"

Reading Prometheus Data from IRONdb

To configure a Prometheus instance to use IRONdb as a remote datasource, the Prometheus YAML configuration file will need to be updated. The remote_read section's url field should be set to http://irondbnode:8112/module/prometheus/read/<accountid>/<uuid>.

This should look something like:

remote_read:
  - url: "https://irondbnode:8112/module/prometheus/read/1/321b704b-a8ff-44b7-8171-777dc49bc788"

But with an account ID and UUID value matching what was configured in the remote write URL.