Table of Contents

Getting started #

Thanos provides a global query view, high availability, data backup with historical, cheap data access as its core features in a single binary.

Those features can be deployed independently of each other. This allows you to have a subset of Thanos features ready for immediate benefit or testing, while also making it flexible for gradual roll outs in more complex environments.

In this quick-start guide, we will explain:

  • How to ask questions, build and contribute to Thanos.
  • A few common ways of deploying Thanos.
  • Links for further reading.

Thanos will work in cloud native environments as well as more traditional ones. Some users run Thanos in Kubernetes while others on the bare metal.

Dependencies #

Thanos aims for a simple deployment and maintenance model. The only dependencies are:

Get Thanos! #

You can find the latest Thanos release here.

Main should be stable and usable. Every commit to main builds docker image named main-<data>-<sha> in quay.io/thanos/thanos and thanosio/thanos dockerhub (mirror)

We also perform minor releases every 6 weeks.

During that, we build tarballs for major platforms and release docker images.

See release process docs for details.

Building from source: #

Thanos is built purely in Golang, thus allowing to run Thanos on various x64 operating systems.

Thanos can not be downloaded nor installed via the go get or go install methods. Starting in Go 1.17, installing executables with go get is deprecated. go install may be used instead. However, in order to avoid ambiguity, when go install is used with a version suffix, all arguments must refer to main packages in the same module at the same version. If that module has a go.mod file, it must not contain directives like replace or exclude that would cause it to be interpreted differently if it were the main module.

Thanos uses the directive replace. The reason is to provide a way to unblock ourselves promptly while also being flexible in the packages that we (re)use. Support for go install is not likely at this point.

If you want to build Thanos from source you would need a working installation of the Go 1.18+ toolchain (GOPATH, PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:${PATH}). Next one should make a clone of our repository:

git clone git@github.com:thanos-io/thanos.git

When you have access to the source code locally, we have prepared a Makefile. Invoke this by using make in your CLI. For example make help will list all options. For building Thanos one could use make build

The thanos binary should now be in your project folder and is the only thing required to deploy any of its components.

Contributing #

Contributions are very welcome! See our CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

Community #

Thanos is an open source project and we value and welcome new contributors and members of the community. Here are ways to get in touch with the community:

Maintainers #

See MAINTAINERS.md.

Community Thanos Kubernetes Applications #

Thanos is not tied to Kubernetes. However, Kubernetes, Thanos and Prometheus are part of the CNCF so the most popular applications are on top of Kubernetes.

Our friendly community maintains a few different ways of installing Thanos on Kubernetes. See those below:

If you want to add yourself to this list, let us know!

Deploying Thanos #

Operating #

See up to date jsonnet mixins We also have example Grafana dashboards here and some alerts to get you started.

Talks #

Blog posts #

Integrations #

See Integrations page.

Testing Thanos on Single Host #

We don’t recommend running Thanos on a single node on production. Thanos is designed and built to run as a distributed system. Vanilla Prometheus might be totally enough for small setups.

However, in case you want to play and run Thanos components on a single node, we recommend following the port layout:

ComponentInterfacePort
SidecargRPC10901
SidecarHTTP10902
QuerygRPC10903
QueryHTTP10904
StoregRPC10905
StoreHTTP10906
ReceivegRPC (store API)10907
ReceiveHTTP (remote write API)10908
ReceiveHTTP10909
RulegRPC10910
RuleHTTP10911
CompactHTTP10912
Query FrontendHTTP10913

You can see example one-node setup here.


Found a typo, inconsistency or missing information in our docs? Help us to improve Thanos documentation by proposing a fix on GitHub here ❤️