Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by eatonphil on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:38AM (#30855045)

It's hard to tell exactly how this works but judging from the tutorial's docker-compose.yml [0] it looks like this runs as a separate API next to Prometheus and you tell Prometheus to write [1] to Mimir. I'm unclear how reads work from it or maybe there is no read?

Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding.

[0] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/docs/sources/tuto...

[1] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/docs/sources/tuto...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by pracucci on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:47AM (#30855173)

Mimir exposes both remote write API and Prometheus compatible API. The typical setup is that you configure Prometheus (or Grafana Agent) to remote write to Mimir and then you configure Grafana (or your preferred query tool) to query metrics from Mimir.

You may also be interested into looking at a 5 minutes introduction video, where I cover the overall architecture too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej9y3KILV8g

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by eatonphil on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:49AM (#30855194)

Cool! Personally I don't like watching videos, preferring to read prose or code or see an arch diagram. But good that it's available.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by pracucci on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @11:13AM (#30856287)

I'm the author of the video, but personally I also prefer to read prose instead of watching videos!

The architecture is covered here: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/archit...

There's also an hands-on tutorial here: https://grafana.com/tutorials/play-with-grafana-mimir/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by bboreham on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:46AM (#30855156)

It’s a centralised multi-tenant store, supporting the Prometheus query API. So you can point clients directly at Mimir, they send in PromQL and they get data back in Json.

(Note I work on Mimir)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by k8sToGo on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:50AM (#30855202)

But who does the scraping of the prometheus agents? Mimir or still prometheus server?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by Duologic on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @10:38AM (#30855808)

Last year I wrote a blog post about this exact question: Who watches the watchers?

The general takeaway is that you run a minimal prometheus/alertmanager setup that only scrapes the agents, then use a dead man switch-like system to ensure this pipeline keeps working.

Link: https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/08/how-we-use-metamonitorin...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by bboreham on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @10:01AM (#30855354)

If you have systems exporting metrics in Prometheus style, then you can use Prometheus to scrape them and remote-write to Mimir.

You can alternately use Prometheus Agent, to save storing the data and running a query engine at the leaf.

You can also use the OpenTelemetry suite to perform the same operation, though this is more appealing if you want some other OpenTelemetry features at the same time. Eg if you prefer the ‘pipeline’ style.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by inkel on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @10:03AM (#30855379)

You configure with Remote Write [1] to the Mimir instance. Then the Prometheus agents will send the metrics to Mimir.

1: https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/c...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by eatonphil on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:47AM (#30855169)

Is there an example of running mimir without prometheus?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage f... by bboreham on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:54AM (#30855273)

For example sending metrics from an OpenTelemetry pipeline.

Mimir accepts the Prometheus remote-write api, which is protobuf-over-http; can be generated by anything really.

[ Parent | on HN ]