NOTE: It is recommended to keep deploying rules inside the relevant Prometheus servers locally. Use ruler only on specific cases. Read details below why.
The rule component should in particular not be used to circumvent solving rule deployment properly at the configuration management level.
The thanos rule command evaluates Prometheus recording and alerting rules against chosen query API via repeated --query (or FileSD via --query.sd). If more than one query is passed, round robin balancing is performed.
By default, rule evaluation results are written back to disk in the Prometheus 2.0 storage format. Rule nodes at the same time participate in the system as source store nodes, which means that they expose StoreAPI and upload their generated TSDB blocks to an object store.
Rule also has a stateless mode which sends rule evaluation results to some remote storages via remote write for better scalability. This way, rule nodes only work as a data producer and the remote receive nodes work as source store nodes. It means that Thanos Rule in this mode does not expose the StoreAPI.
You can think of Rule as a simplified Prometheus that does not require a sidecar and does not scrape and do PromQL evaluation (no QueryAPI).
The data of each Rule node can be labeled to satisfy the clusters labeling scheme. High-availability pairs can be run in parallel and should be distinguished by the designated replica label, just like regular Prometheus servers. Read more about Ruler in HA here
thanos rule \
--data-dir "/path/to/data" \
--eval-interval "30s" \
--rule-file "/path/to/rules/*.rules.yaml" \
--alert.query-url "http://0.0.0.0:9090" \ # This tells what query URL to link to in UI.
--alertmanagers.url "http://alert.thanos.io" \
--query "query.example.org" \
--query "query2.example.org" \
--objstore.config-file "bucket.yml" \
--label 'monitor_cluster="cluster1"' \
--label 'replica="A"'
Ruler has conceptual tradeoffs that might not be favorable for most use cases. The main tradeoff is its dependence on query reliability. For Prometheus it is unlikely to have alert/recording rule evaluation failure as evaluation is local.
For Ruler the read path is distributed, since most likely Ruler is querying Thanos Querier which gets data from remote Store APIs.
This means that query failure are more likely to happen, that’s why clear strategy on what will happen to alert and during query unavailability is the key.
Rule files use YAML, the syntax of a rule file is:
groups:
[ - <rule_group> ]
A simple example rules file would be:
groups:
- name: example
rules:
- record: job:http_inprogress_requests:sum
expr: sum(http_inprogress_requests) by (job)
<rule_group>
# The name of the group. Must be unique within a file.
name: <string>
# How often rules in the group are evaluated.
[ interval: <duration> | default = global.evaluation_interval ]
rules:
[ - <rule> ... ]
Thanos supports two types of rules which may be configured and then evaluated at regular intervals: recording rules and alerting rules.
Recording rules allow you to precompute frequently needed or computationally expensive expressions and save their result as a new set of time series. Querying the precomputed result will then often be much faster than executing the original expression every time it is needed. This is especially useful for dashboards, which need to query the same expression repeatedly every time they refresh.
Recording and alerting rules exist in a rule group. Rules within a group are run sequentially at a regular interval.
The syntax for recording rules is:
# The name of the time series to output to. Must be a valid metric name.
record: <string>
# The PromQL expression to evaluate. Every evaluation cycle this is
# evaluated at the current time, and the result recorded as a new set of
# time series with the metric name as given by 'record'.
expr: <string>
# Labels to add or overwrite before storing the result.
labels:
[ <labelname>: <labelvalue> ]
Note: If you make use of recording rules, make sure that you expose your Ruler instance as a store in the Thanos Querier so that the new time series can be queried as part of Thanos Query. One of the ways you can do this is by adding a new --store <thanos-ruler-ip> command-line argument to the Thanos Query command.
The syntax for alerting rules is:
# The name of the alert. Must be a valid metric name.
alert: <string>
# The PromQL expression to evaluate. Every evaluation cycle this is
# evaluated at the current time, and all resultant time series become
# pending/firing alerts.
expr: <string>
# Alerts are considered firing once they have been returned for this long.
# Alerts which have not yet fired for long enough are considered pending.
[ for: <duration> | default = 0s ]
# Labels to add or overwrite for each alert.
labels:
[ <labelname>: <tmpl_string> ]
# Annotations to add to each alert.
annotations:
[ <labelname>: <tmpl_string> ]
See this on initial info.
Rule allows you to specify rule groups with additional fields that control PartialResponseStrategy e.g:
groups:
- name: "warn strategy"
partial_response_strategy: "warn"
rules:
- alert: "some"
expr: "up"
- name: "abort strategy"
partial_response_strategy: "abort"
rules:
- alert: "some"
expr: "up"
- name: "by default strategy is abort"
rules:
- alert: "some"
expr: "up"
It is recommended to keep partial response as abort for alerts and that is the default as well.
Essentially, for alerting, having partial response can result in symptoms being missed by Rule’s alert.
To be sure that alerting works it is essential to monitor Ruler and alert from another Scraper (Prometheus + sidecar) that sits in same cluster.
The most important metrics to alert on are:
thanos_alert_sender_alerts_dropped_total. If greater than 0, it means that alerts triggered by Rule are not being sent to alertmanager which might indicate connection, incompatibility or misconfiguration problems.
prometheus_rule_evaluation_failures_total. If greater than 0, it means that that rule failed to be evaluated, which results in either gap in rule or potentially ignored alert. This metric might indicate problems on the queryAPI endpoint you use. Alert heavily on this if this happens for longer than your alert thresholds. strategy label will tell you if failures comes from rules that tolerate partial response or not.
prometheus_rule_group_last_duration_seconds < prometheus_rule_group_interval_seconds If the difference is large, it means that rule evaluation took more time than the scheduled interval. It can indicate that your query backend (e.g Querier) takes too much time to evaluate the query, i.e. that it is not fast enough to fill the rule. This might indicate other problems like slow StoreAPis or too complex query expression in rule.
thanos_rule_evaluation_with_warnings_total. If you choose to use Rules and Alerts with partial response strategy’s value as “warn”, this metric will tell you how many evaluation ended up with some kind of warning. To see the actual warnings see WARN log level. This might suggest that those evaluations return partial response and might not be accurate.
Those metrics are important for vanilla Prometheus as well, but even more important when we rely on (sometimes WAN) network.
// TODO(bwplotka): Rereview them after recent changes in metrics.
See alerts for more example alerts for ruler.
NOTE: It is also recommended to set a mocked Alert on Ruler that checks if Query is up. This might be something simple like vector(1) query, just to check if Querier is live.
As rule nodes outsource query processing to query nodes, they should generally experience little load. If necessary, functional sharding can be applied by splitting up the sets of rules between HA pairs. Rules are processed with deduplicated data according to the replica label configured on query nodes.
It is mandatory to add certain external labels to indicate the ruler origin (e.g label='replica="A"' or for cluster). Otherwise running multiple ruler replicas will be not possible, resulting in clash during compaction.
NOTE: It is advised to put different external labels than labels given by other sources we are recording or alerting against.
For example:
mon1 and we have Prometheus in cluster eu1cluster=eu1 for Prometheus and cluster=mon1 for Ruler.ScraperIsDown alert that monitors service from work1 cluster.ScraperIsDown{cluster=mon1} since external labels always replace source labels.This effectively drops the important metadata and makes it impossible to tell in what exactly cluster the ScraperIsDown alert found problem without falling back to manual query.
On HTTP address Ruler exposes its UI that shows mainly Alerts and Rules page (similar to Prometheus Alerts page). Each alert is linked to the query that the alert is performing, which you can click to navigate to the configured alert.query-url.
Ruler aims to use a similar approach to the one that Prometheus has. You can configure external labels, as well as relabelling.
In case of Ruler in HA you need to make sure you have the following labelling setup:
cluster="eu1", replica="A" and cluster=eu1, replica="B" by using --label flag.--alert.label-drop="replica".Advanced relabelling configuration is possible with the --alert.relabel-config and --alert.relabel-config-file flags. The configuration format is identical to the alert_relabel_configs field of Prometheus. Note that Thanos Ruler drops the labels listed in --alert.label-drop before alert relabelling.
Stateless ruler enables nearly indefinite horizontal scalability. Ruler doesn’t have a fully functional TSDB for storing evaluation results, but uses a WAL only storage and sends data to some remote storage via remote write.
The WAL only storage reuses the upstream Prometheus agent and it is compatible with the old TSDB data. For more design purpose of this mode, please refer to the proposal.
Stateless mode can be enabled by providing Prometheus remote write config in file via --remote-write.config or inlined --remote-write.config-file flag. For example:
thanos rule \
--data-dir "/path/to/data" \
--eval-interval "30s" \
--rule-file "/path/to/rules/*.rules.yaml" \
--alert.query-url "http://0.0.0.0:9090" \ # This tells what query URL to link to in UI.
--alertmanagers.url "http://alert.thanos.io" \
--query "query.example.org" \
--query "query2.example.org" \
--objstore.config-file "bucket.yml" \
--label 'monitor_cluster="cluster1"' \
--label 'replica="A"' \
--remote-write.config-file 'rw-config.yaml'
Where rw-config.yaml could look as follows:
remote_write:
- url: http://e2e_test_rule_remote_write-receive-1:8081/api/v1/receive
name: thanos-receiver
follow_redirects: false
- url: https://e2e_test_rule_remote_write-receive-2:443/api/v1/receive
remote_timeout: 30s
follow_redirects: true
queue_config:
capacity: 120000
max_shards: 50
min_shards: 1
max_samples_per_send: 40000
batch_send_deadline: 5s
min_backoff: 5s
max_backoff: 5m
You can pass this in file using --remote-write.config-file= or inline it using --remote-write.config=.
NOTE:
metadata_config is not supported in this mode and will be ignored if provided in the remote write configuration.usage: thanos rule [<flags>]
Ruler evaluating Prometheus rules against given Query nodes, exposing Store API
and storing old blocks in bucket.
Flags:
--alert.label-drop=ALERT.LABEL-DROP ...
Labels by name to drop before sending
to alertmanager. This allows alert to be
deduplicated on replica label (repeated).
Similar Prometheus alert relabelling
--alert.query-url=ALERT.QUERY-URL
The external Thanos Query URL that would be set
in all alerts 'Source' field
--alert.relabel-config=<content>
Alternative to 'alert.relabel-config-file' flag
(mutually exclusive). Content of YAML file that
contains alert relabelling configuration.
--alert.relabel-config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file that contains alert
relabelling configuration.
--alertmanagers.config=<content>
Alternative to 'alertmanagers.config-file'
flag (mutually exclusive). Content
of YAML file that contains alerting
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/components/rule.md/#configuration.
If defined, it takes precedence
over the '--alertmanagers.url' and
'--alertmanagers.send-timeout' flags.
--alertmanagers.config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file that contains alerting
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/components/rule.md/#configuration.
If defined, it takes precedence
over the '--alertmanagers.url' and
'--alertmanagers.send-timeout' flags.
--alertmanagers.sd-dns-interval=30s
Interval between DNS resolutions of
Alertmanager hosts.
--alertmanagers.send-timeout=10s
Timeout for sending alerts to Alertmanager
--alertmanagers.url=ALERTMANAGERS.URL ...
Alertmanager replica URLs to push firing
alerts. Ruler claims success if push to
at least one alertmanager from discovered
succeeds. The scheme should not be empty
e.g `http` might be used. The scheme may be
prefixed with 'dns+' or 'dnssrv+' to detect
Alertmanager IPs through respective DNS
lookups. The port defaults to 9093 or the
SRV record's value. The URL path is used as a
prefix for the regular Alertmanager API path.
--data-dir="data/" data directory
--eval-interval=1m The default evaluation interval to use.
--for-grace-period=10m Minimum duration between alert and restored
"for" state. This is maintained only for alerts
with configured "for" time greater than grace
period.
--for-outage-tolerance=1h Max time to tolerate prometheus outage for
restoring "for" state of alert.
--grpc-address="0.0.0.0:10901"
Listen ip:port address for gRPC endpoints
(StoreAPI). Make sure this address is routable
from other components.
--grpc-grace-period=2m Time to wait after an interrupt received for
GRPC Server.
--grpc-server-tls-cert="" TLS Certificate for gRPC server, leave blank to
disable TLS
--grpc-server-tls-client-ca=""
TLS CA to verify clients against. If no
client CA is specified, there is no client
verification on server side. (tls.NoClientCert)
--grpc-server-tls-key="" TLS Key for the gRPC server, leave blank to
disable TLS
--hash-func= Specify which hash function to use when
calculating the hashes of produced files.
If no function has been specified, it does not
happen. This permits avoiding downloading some
files twice albeit at some performance cost.
Possible values are: "", "SHA256".
-h, --help Show context-sensitive help (also try
--help-long and --help-man).
--http-address="0.0.0.0:10902"
Listen host:port for HTTP endpoints.
--http-grace-period=2m Time to wait after an interrupt received for
HTTP Server.
--http.config="" [EXPERIMENTAL] Path to the configuration file
that can enable TLS or authentication for all
HTTP endpoints.
--label=<name>="<value>" ...
Labels to be applied to all generated metrics
(repeated). Similar to external labels for
Prometheus, used to identify ruler and its
blocks as unique source.
--log.format=logfmt Log format to use. Possible options: logfmt or
json.
--log.level=info Log filtering level.
--log.request.decision= Deprecation Warning - This flag would
be soon deprecated, and replaced with
`request.logging-config`. Request Logging
for logging the start and end of requests. By
default this flag is disabled. LogFinishCall:
Logs the finish call of the requests.
LogStartAndFinishCall: Logs the start and
finish call of the requests. NoLogCall: Disable
request logging.
--objstore.config=<content>
Alternative to 'objstore.config-file'
flag (mutually exclusive). Content of
YAML file that contains object store
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/storage.md/#configuration
--objstore.config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file that contains object
store configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/storage.md/#configuration
--query=<query> ... Addresses of statically configured query
API servers (repeatable). The scheme may be
prefixed with 'dns+' or 'dnssrv+' to detect
query API servers through respective DNS
lookups.
--query.config=<content> Alternative to 'query.config-file' flag
(mutually exclusive). Content of YAML
file that contains query API servers
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/components/rule.md/#configuration.
If defined, it takes precedence over the
'--query' and '--query.sd-files' flags.
--query.config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file that contains query API
servers configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/components/rule.md/#configuration.
If defined, it takes precedence over the
'--query' and '--query.sd-files' flags.
--query.default-step=1s Default range query step to use. This is
only used in stateless Ruler and alert state
restoration.
--query.http-method=POST HTTP method to use when sending queries.
Possible options: [GET, POST]
--query.sd-dns-interval=30s
Interval between DNS resolutions.
--query.sd-files=<path> ...
Path to file that contains addresses of query
API servers. The path can be a glob pattern
(repeatable).
--query.sd-interval=5m Refresh interval to re-read file SD files.
(used as a fallback)
--remote-write.config=<content>
Alternative to 'remote-write.config-file'
flag (mutually exclusive). Content
of YAML config for the remote-write
configurations, that specify servers
where samples should be sent to (see
https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#remote_write).
This automatically enables stateless mode
for ruler and no series will be stored in the
ruler's TSDB. If an empty config (or file) is
provided, the flag is ignored and ruler is run
with its own TSDB.
--remote-write.config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML config for the remote-write
configurations, that specify servers
where samples should be sent to (see
https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#remote_write).
This automatically enables stateless mode
for ruler and no series will be stored in the
ruler's TSDB. If an empty config (or file) is
provided, the flag is ignored and ruler is run
with its own TSDB.
--request.logging-config=<content>
Alternative to 'request.logging-config-file'
flag (mutually exclusive). Content
of YAML file with request logging
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/logging.md/#configuration
--request.logging-config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file with request logging
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/logging.md/#configuration
--resend-delay=1m Minimum amount of time to wait before resending
an alert to Alertmanager.
--restore-ignored-label=RESTORE-IGNORED-LABEL ...
Label names to be ignored when restoring alerts
from the remote storage. This is only used in
stateless mode.
--rule-file=rules/ ... Rule files that should be used by rule
manager. Can be in glob format (repeated).
Note that rules are not automatically detected,
use SIGHUP or do HTTP POST /-/reload to re-read
them.
--shipper.upload-compacted
If true shipper will try to upload compacted
blocks as well. Useful for migration purposes.
Works only if compaction is disabled on
Prometheus. Do it once and then disable the
flag when done.
--tracing.config=<content>
Alternative to 'tracing.config-file' flag
(mutually exclusive). Content of YAML file
with tracing configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/tracing.md/#configuration
--tracing.config-file=<file-path>
Path to YAML file with tracing
configuration. See format details:
https://thanos.io/tip/thanos/tracing.md/#configuration
--tsdb.block-duration=2h Block duration for TSDB block.
--tsdb.no-lockfile Do not create lockfile in TSDB data directory.
In any case, the lockfiles will be deleted on
next startup.
--tsdb.retention=48h Block retention time on local disk.
--tsdb.wal-compression Compress the tsdb WAL.
--version Show application version.
--web.disable-cors Whether to disable CORS headers to be set by
Thanos. By default Thanos sets CORS headers to
be allowed by all.
--web.external-prefix="" Static prefix for all HTML links and redirect
URLs in the bucket web UI interface.
Actual endpoints are still served on / or the
web.route-prefix. This allows thanos bucket
web UI to be served behind a reverse proxy that
strips a URL sub-path.
--web.prefix-header="" Name of HTTP request header used for dynamic
prefixing of UI links and redirects.
This option is ignored if web.external-prefix
argument is set. Security risk: enable
this option only if a reverse proxy in
front of thanos is resetting the header.
The --web.prefix-header=X-Forwarded-Prefix
option can be useful, for example, if Thanos
UI is served via Traefik reverse proxy with
PathPrefixStrip option enabled, which sends the
stripped prefix value in X-Forwarded-Prefix
header. This allows thanos UI to be served on a
sub-path.
--web.route-prefix="" Prefix for API and UI endpoints. This allows
thanos UI to be served on a sub-path. This
option is analogous to --web.route-prefix of
Prometheus.
The --alertmanagers.config and --alertmanagers.config-file flags allow specifying multiple Alertmanagers. Those entries are treated as a single HA group. This means that alert send failure is claimed only if the Ruler fails to send to all instances.
The configuration format is the following:
alertmanagers:
- http_config:
basic_auth:
username: ""
password: ""
password_file: ""
bearer_token: ""
bearer_token_file: ""
proxy_url: ""
tls_config:
ca_file: ""
cert_file: ""
key_file: ""
server_name: ""
insecure_skip_verify: false
static_configs: []
file_sd_configs:
- files: []
refresh_interval: 0s
scheme: http
path_prefix: ""
timeout: 10s
api_version: v1
Supported values for api_version are v1 or v2.
The --query.config and --query.config-file flags allow specifying multiple query endpoints. Those entries are treated as a single HA group. This means that query failure is claimed only if the Ruler fails to query all instances.
The configuration format is the following:
- http_config:
basic_auth:
username: ""
password: ""
password_file: ""
bearer_token: ""
bearer_token_file: ""
proxy_url: ""
tls_config:
ca_file: ""
cert_file: ""
key_file: ""
server_name: ""
insecure_skip_verify: false
static_configs: []
file_sd_configs:
- files: []
refresh_interval: 0s
scheme: http
path_prefix: ""
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