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 the most important changes since version 0.10.0 that help you edit your PromQL expressions more confidently and effectively:

Showing values for label names

When looking at part of a query, you often want to get a quick overview not only of its label names, but what the label values look like for each of those names. When hovering over a label name in the tree view, PromLens now shows you the top 5 label values for each label name, according to their number of occurrences in the sub-expression's result:

Clicking on a label name will insert a new query below the current one that calculates the full list of values for that label, sorted by their number of occurrences:

This allows you to get much quicker insight into the data you are working with when building a query.

Query hints and quick-fix actions

It's easy to make mistakes when editing PromQL, and building some constructs manually is cumbersome. PromLens now shows warning hints and quick-fix buttons for nodes in the tree view when something seems off with part of a query. For example, if you try to run a counter-only function like rate() on something that looks like a gauge metric, you will get a warning, along with a suggestion to switch to deriv instead:

Or when you forget to keep the le label in an aggregated histogram before feeding it into histogram_quantile(), you will get a warning about the missing label, while a quick-fix button allows to you to add the label to the aggregation:

As another example, if you have just selected a histogram metric, PromLens will recognize this and offer you a quick-action button to compute an aggregated quantile from it:

There are a number of other query hints and quick action buttons that will help make your PromQL editing experience more smooth.

Like the other stats in the tree view, you can turn these query hints and quick actions on or off in the global settings menu:

The full version of PromLens allows you to persist and share links to the full state of a PromLens page. Shared links are currently stored either in a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket or in an SQL-based database. For SQL-based link-sharing databases, a new --shared-links.sql.retention flag now allows setting a maximum retention time after which the links are deleted by a cleanup loop in the PromLens backend.

For limiting the retention time in GCS-based storage, we recommend configuring a bucket retention policy.

Become more productive with PromLens today!

We are continuously improving PromLens and hope that you will enjoy these new features. You can see the full list of changes in the PromLens 0.11.0 changelog. Check out PromLens today, deploy the free preview version, get the full on-premise version, and report any issues or feature requests you may encounter.

Happy monitoring!


December 15, 2020 by Julius Volz

Tags: promlens, promql