pushgateway

README

Prometheus Pushgateway

The Prometheus Pushgateway exists to allow ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Since these kinds of jobs may not exist long enough to be scraped, they can instead push their metrics to a Pushgateway. The Pushgateway then exposes these metrics to Prometheus.

Non-goals

The Pushgateway is explicitly not an aggregator or distributed counter but rather a metrics cache. It does not have statsd-like semantics. The metrics pushed are exactly the same as you would present for scraping in a permanently running program. If you need distributed counting, you could either use the actual statsd in combination with the Prometheus statsd exporter, or have a look at Weavework's aggregation gateway. With more experience gathered, the Prometheus project might one day be able to provide a native solution, separate from or possibly even as part of the Pushgateway.

For machine-level metrics, the textfile collector of the Node exporter is usually more appropriate. The Pushgateway is intended for service-level metrics.

The Pushgateway is not an event store. While you can use Prometheus as a data source for Grafana annotations, tracking something like release events has to happen with some event-logging framework.

A while ago, we decided to not implement a “timeout” or TTL for pushed metrics because almost all proposed use cases turned out to be anti-patterns we strongly discourage. You can follow a more recent discussion on the prometheus-developers mailing list.

Run it

Download binary releases for your platform from the release page and unpack the tarball.

If you want to compile yourself from the sources, you need a working Go setup. Then use the provided Makefile (type make).

For the most basic setup, just start the binary. To change the address to listen on, use the --web.listen-address flag (e.g. "0.0.0.0:9091" or ":9091"). By default, Pushgateway does not persist metrics. However, the --persistence.file flag allows you to specify a file in which the pushed metrics will be persisted (so that they survive restarts of the Pushgateway).

Using Docker

You can deploy the Pushgateway using the prom/pushgateway Docker image.

For example:

docker pull prom/pushgateway

docker run -d -p 9091:9091 prom/pushgateway

Use it

Configure the Pushgateway as a target to scrape

The Pushgateway has to be configured as a target to scrape by Prometheus, using one of the usual methods. However, you should always set honor_labels: true in the scrape config (see below for a detailed explanation).

Libraries

Prometheus client libraries should have a feature to push the registered metrics to a Pushgateway. Usually, a Prometheus client passively presents metric for scraping by a Prometheus server. A client library that supports pushing has a push function, which needs to be called by the client code. It will then actively push the metrics to a Pushgateway, using the API described below.

Command line

Using the Prometheus text protocol, pushing metrics is so easy that no separate CLI is provided. Simply use a command-line HTTP tool like curl. Your favorite scripting language has most likely some built-in HTTP capabilities you can leverage here as well.

Caveat: Note that in the text protocol, each line has to end with a line-feed character (aka 'LF' or '\n'). Ending a line in other ways, e.g. with 'CR' aka '\r', 'CRLF' aka '\r\n', or just the end of the packet, will result in a protocol error.

Pushed metrics are managed in groups, identified by a grouping key of any number of labels, of which one must be the job label. The groups are easy to inspect via the web interface.

Examples:

• Push a single sample into the group identified by {job="some_job"}:

    echo "some_metric 3.14" | curl --data-binary @- http://pushgateway.example.org:9091/metrics/job/some_job
  

  Since no type information has been provided, some_metric will be of type untyped.

• Push something more complex into the group identified by {job="some_job",instance="some_instance"}:

    cat <<EOF | curl --data-binary @- http://pushgateway.example.org:9091/metrics/job/some_job/instance/some_instance
    # TYPE some_metric counter
    some_metric{label="val1"} 42
    # TYPE another_metric gauge
    # HELP another_metric Just an example.
    another_metric 2398.283
    EOF
  

  Note how type information and help strings are provided. Those lines are optional, but strongly encouraged for anything more complex.

• Delete all metrics in the group identified by {job="some_job",instance="some_instance"}:

    curl -X DELETE http://pushgateway.example.org:9091/metrics/job/some_job/instance/some_instance
  

• Delete all metrics in the group identified by {job="some_job"} (note that this does not include metrics in the {job="some_job",instance="some_instance"} group from the previous example, even if those metrics have the same job label):

    curl -X DELETE http://pushgateway.example.org:9091/metrics/job/some_job
  

About the job and instance labels

The Prometheus server will attach a job label and an instance label to each scraped metric. The value of the job label comes from the scrape configuration. When you configure the Pushgateway as a scrape target for your Prometheus server, you will probably pick a job name like pushgateway. The value of the instance label is automatically set to the host and port of the target scraped. Hence, all the metrics scraped from the Pushgateway will have the host and port of the Pushgateway as the instance label and a job label like pushgateway. The conflict with the job and instance labels you might have attached to the metrics pushed to the Pushgateway is solved by renaming those labels to exported_job and exported_instance.

However, this behavior is usually undesired when scraping a Pushgateway. Generally, you would like to retain the job and instance labels of the metrics pushed to the Pushgateway. That's why you have set honor_labels: true in the scrape config for the Pushgateway. It enables the desired behavior. See the documentation for details.

This leaves us with the case where the metrics pushed to the Pushgateway do not feature an instance label. This case is quite common as the pushed metrics are often on a service level and therefore not related to a particular instance. Even with honor_labels: true, the Prometheus server will attach an instance label if no instance label has been set in the first place. Therefore, if a metric is pushed to the Pushgateway without an instance label (and without instance label in the grouping key, see below), the Pushgateway will export it with an emtpy instance label ({instance=""}), which is equivalent to having no instance label at all but prevents the server from attaching one.

About timestamps

If you push metrics at time t₁, you might be tempted to believe that Prometheus will scrape them with that same timestamp t₁. Instead, what Prometheus attaches as a timestamp is the time when it scrapes the Pushgateway. Why so?

In the world view of Prometheus, a metric can be scraped at any time. A metric that cannot be scraped has basically ceased to exist. Prometheus is somewhat tolerant, but if it cannot get any samples for a metric in 5min, it will behave as if that metric does not exist anymore. Preventing that is actually one of the reasons to use a Pushgateway. The Pushgateway will make the metrics of your ephemeral job scrapable at any time. Attaching the time of pushing as a timestamp would defeat that purpose because 5min after the last push, your metric will look as stale to Prometheus as if it could not be scraped at all anymore. (Prometheus knows only one timestamp per sample, there is no way to distinguish a 'time of pushing' and a 'time of scraping'.)

As there are essentially no use cases where it would make sense to to attach a different timestamp, and many users attempting to incorrectly do so (despite no client library supporting this) any pushes with timestamps will be rejected.

If you think you need to push a timestamp, please see When To Use The Pushgateway.

In order to make it easier to alert on pushers that have not run recently, the Pushgateway will add in a metric push_time_seconds with the Unix timestamp of the last POST/PUT to each group. This will override any pushed metric by that name.

API

All pushes are done via HTTP. The interface is vaguely REST-like.

URL

The default port the push gateway is listening to is 9091. The path looks like

/metrics/job/<JOBNAME>{/<LABEL_NAME>/<LABEL_VALUE>}

<JOBNAME> is used as the value of the job label, followed by any number of other label pairs (which might or might not include an instance label). The label set defined by the URL path is used as a grouping key. Any of those labels already set in the body of the request (as regular labels, e.g. name{job="foo"} 42) will be overwritten to match the labels defined by the URL path!

Note that / cannot be used as part of a label value or the job name, even if escaped as %2F. (The decoding happens before the path routing kicks in, cf. the Go documentation of URL.Path.)

PUT method

PUT is used to push a group of metrics. All metrics with the grouping key specified in the URL are replaced by the metrics pushed with PUT.

The body of the request contains the metrics to push either as delimited binary protocol buffers or in the simple flat text format (both in version 0.0.4, see the data exposition format specification). Discrimination between the two variants is done via the Content-Type header. (Use the value application/vnd.google.protobuf; proto=io.prometheus.client.MetricFamily; encoding=delimited for protocol buffers, otherwise the text format is tried as a fall-back.)

The response code upon success is always 202 (even if the same grouping key has never been used before, i.e. there is no feedback to the client if the push has replaced an existing group of metrics or created a new one).

If using the protobuf format, do not send duplicate MetricFamily proto messages (i.e. more than one with the same name) in one push, as they will overwrite each other.

A successfully finished request means that the pushed metrics are queued for an update of the storage. Scraping the push gateway may still yield the old results until the queued update is processed. Neither is there a guarantee that the pushed metrics are persisted to disk. (A server crash may cause data loss. Or the push gateway is configured to not persist to disk at all.)

A PUT request with an empty body effectively deletes all metrics with the specified grouping key. However, in contrast to the DELETE request described below, it does update the push_time_seconds metrics.

POST method

POST works exactly like the PUT method but only metrics with the same name as the newly pushed metrics are replaced (among those with the same grouping key).

A POST request with an empty body merely updates the push_time_seconds metrics but does not change any of the previously pushed metrics.

DELETE method

DELETE is used to delete metrics from the push gateway. The request must not contain any content. All metrics with the grouping key specified in the URL are deleted.

The response code upon success is always 202. The delete request is merely queued at that moment. There is no guarantee that the request will actually be executed or that the result will make it to the persistence layer (e.g. in case of a server crash). However, the order of PUT/POST and DELETE request is guaranteed, i.e. if you have successfully sent a DELETE request and then send a PUT, it is guaranteed that the DELETE will be processed first (and vice versa).

Deleting a grouping key without metrics is a no-op and will not result in an error.

Exposed metrics

The Pushgateway exposes the following metrics via the configured --web.telemetry-path (default: /metrics):

• The pushed metrics.
• For earch pushed group, a metric push_time_seconds as explained above.
• The usual metrics provided by the Prometheus Go client library, i.e.:
  • process_...
  • go_...
  • promhttp_metric_handler_requests_...
• A number of metrics specific to the Pushgateway, as documented by the example scrape below.

# HELP pushgateway_build_info A metric with a constant '1' value labeled by version, revision, branch, and goversion from which pushgateway was built.
# TYPE pushgateway_build_info gauge
pushgateway_build_info{branch="master",goversion="go1.10.2",revision="8f88ccb0343fc3382f6b93a9d258797dcb15f770",version="0.5.2"} 1
# HELP pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds HTTP request duration for pushes to the Pushgateway.
# TYPE pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds summary
pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds{method="post",quantile="0.1"} 0.000116755
pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds{method="post",quantile="0.5"} 0.000192608
pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds{method="post",quantile="0.9"} 0.000327593
pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds_sum{method="post"} 0.001622878
pushgateway_http_push_duration_seconds_count{method="post"} 8
# HELP pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes HTTP request size for pushes to the Pushgateway.
# TYPE pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes summary
pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes{method="post",quantile="0.1"} 166
pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes{method="post",quantile="0.5"} 182
pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes{method="post",quantile="0.9"} 196
pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes_sum{method="post"} 1450
pushgateway_http_push_size_bytes_count{method="post"} 8
# HELP pushgateway_http_requests_total Total HTTP requests processed by the Pushgateway, excluding scrapes.
# TYPE pushgateway_http_requests_total counter
pushgateway_http_requests_total{code="200",handler="static",method="get"} 5
pushgateway_http_requests_total{code="200",handler="status",method="get"} 8
pushgateway_http_requests_total{code="202",handler="delete",method="delete"} 1
pushgateway_http_requests_total{code="202",handler="push",method="post"} 6
pushgateway_http_requests_total{code="400",handler="push",method="post"} 2

Development

The normal binary embeds the web files in the resources directory. For development purposes, it is handy to have a running binary use those files directly (so that you can see the effect of changes immediately). To switch to direct usage, add -tags dev to the flags entry in .promu.yml, and then make build. Switch back to "normal" mode by reverting the changes to .promu.yml and typing make assets.

Contributing

Relevant style guidelines are the Go Code Review Comments and the Formatting and style section of Peter Bourgon's Go: Best Practices for Production Environments.