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How Exactly Does PromQL Calculate Rates?
January 29, 2021 by Julius Volz
Counters are a Prometheus metric type whose value only goes up, and which represent cumulative total counts like "How many requests have we handled in total?" or "How many seconds have we spent handling requests?". Since the value of a counter…
PromQL Queries for Exploring Your Metrics
December 17, 2020 by Julius Volz
When building PromQL queries, a frequent need for users is to get an idea of the data they are working with, and a way to explore the space of all available metrics and their labels. While the UI tooling for this is still evolving (PromLens and…
Tags: promql, exploration, metrics, promlens
Showcasing PromLens 0.11.0
December 15, 2020 by Julius Volz
Today we are happy to announce version 0.11.0 of PromLens. PromLens is the ultimate power tool for PromQL that helps you build, analyze, explain, and visualize your queries. In case you are unfamiliar with it, try a demo here. Here is a summary of…
An Update on PromQL Compatibility Across Vendors
December 01, 2020 by Julius Volz
Prometheus's query language PromQL is one of the cornerstones of the Prometheus ecosystem. Back in our August blog post, Comparing PromQL Correctness Across Vendors, we looked at several external projects and monitoring vendors that claimed to offer…
Tags: promql, compliance, testing, vendors, cortex, thanos, victoriametrics, promscale, timescaledb, metricfire, newrelic, m3, grafanacloud, chronosphere
Showcasing PromLens 0.10.0
October 19, 2020 by Julius Volz
Today we are happy to announce version 0.10.0 of PromLens. PromLens is the ultimate power tool for PromQL that helps you build, analyze, explain, and visualize your queries. In case you are unfamiliar with it, this is what it looks like: PromLens…
The Meaning of "Prometheus" - A Tale of Implementations and Interfaces
October 13, 2020 by Julius Volz
What people mean when they say that they "use Prometheus" or "support Prometheus" is evolving over time. Initially, the Prometheus landscape was very focused on a specific set of component implementations, whereas nowadays the focus is shifting more…
Tags: prometheus, promql
Metric Types in Prometheus and PromQL
September 25, 2020 by Julius Volz
Prometheus has the concept of different metric types: counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries. If you've ever wondered what these terms were about, this blog post is for you! We'll look at the meaning of each metric type, how to use it when…
Tags: promql, data model, metric types, instrumentation
Comparing PromQL Correctness Across Vendors
August 06, 2020 by Julius Volz
UPDATE: See our follow-up blog post from December 1 for the latest round of PromQL vendor test results. Prometheus' query language PromQL is one of the most important interfaces in the Prometheus ecosystem. Organizations rely on it to build their…
Tags: promql, compliance, testing, vendors, cortex, thanos, victoriametrics, timescaledb
Selecting Data in PromQL
July 02, 2020 by Julius Volz
In our last post, we looked at the overall anatomy of a PromQL query. Today, let's look a bit closer at the two ways of selecting data in PromQL: instant vector selectors and range vector selectors. We will examine their use cases, the reasoning…
The Anatomy of a PromQL Query
June 18, 2020 by Julius Volz
Let's have a look at the anatomy of a PromQL query. PromQL has operators, functions, selectors, and more, but let's not get bogged down by those details in this post. Let's instead look at the overall nature of a query: How are PromQL queries…