Category: Prometheus

Perils of /metrics data assertions

In the Thanos project the e2e tests are written in part using assertions on the metrics data. I have encountered a few challenges with those assertions that I wanted to share with you.

Always check for the maximum possible value

Writing tests on /metrics data means your testing harness continuously checks /metrics data to see whether some metric equals some value. If the metric takes some time to reach the maximum value, you might erroneously write an equals check that checks for a smaller value. Later on, this will lead to a flaky test situation.

To fix this, I’d suggest running the flaky test locally and trying to write an assertion for a bigger value. Now try to run the same test again and see what happens. Also, look at the logic inside of your code – perhaps it would be possible to calculate the maximum value without using a hard-coded constant?

Check for specific metrics

By default, the end-to-end testing framework only accepts a metric name and sums up all matching series. I would encourage you to be maximally specific because metrics are not usually transactional. In other words, the user (in this case, the e2e testing framework) might see some results that are in the middle of being updated. For instance, if the state is constantly fluctuating then the sum will change but the sum of all matching metrics might never be equal to the desired value. Imagine that we have some code like this (pseudo-code):

foometric.set(123)
// <--- E2E testing framework request for /metrics page comes in here.
barmetric.set(5000)

If the metrics weren’t set previously then the sum can either be 123 or 5123. Hence, the best practice is usually to be as specific as possible with the label matchers. You can use this function to do that.

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Starting up GitHub sponsors and some recent postings work

Hello everyone! I am happy to announce that I’ve set up GitHub sponsors on my profile. If you want to support my blog or my work on Thanos/Prometheus, and you have some free money then now you have a way to throw some money at these projects. Let’s see if I will even get one sponsor. I was thinking that maybe I should work on some custom features that could be behind a paywall. Let’s see when I will have some time to work on them.

I haven’t written anything on my blog for quite some time. I think it’s high time I’ve revived it. Writer’s paralysis probably happened to me, so I haven’t posted anything. Somehow I kept thinking about many topics but was afraid of writing about them and clicking “Publish”. But now it’s time to not be afraid and do that 🙂

Probably the most exciting stuff that I have worked on (and still do) recently is postings encoding improvements in Prometheus & Thanos. It’s now possible to specify a custom postings encoder in the Prometheus compactor: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/13242. After https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/13567 it will even be possible to use a custom postings decoder. The postings data structure sits at the core of the Prometheus TSDB – it is used for storing sets of sorted integers. Whenever someone specifies some label matcher in a query e.g. {foo="bar"} then Prometheus goes through the set of series (postings) which have foo="bar" in their labels. So, it is paramount to make this data structure as efficient as possible.

Currently, each integer is simply stored using 4 bytes. It’s possible to be much better than that. For example, if you have a set of integers 1, 2, 3, 4..., 10 then it’s enough to only say that there’s a run of 10 integers starting from 1. Over time, many more techniques for compression were invented.

I have researched what is available and found out that the most popular paper (probably) is this one https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6399 by Daniel Lemire & others. I love his work in particular because he always puts up the source code for his paper. It’s a huge help! I wish more people had done that.

We have a few constraints in the Thanos/Prometheus world:

  • We should read posting lists only in one direction i.e. we shouldn’t need to read them twice. Some encoding formats force the reader to read twice like the patch frame-of-reference variants. This constraint is needed because we would like to avoid allocating memory for the whole postings list if possible to save a lot of memory. In the Thanos world, the list could be easily hundreds of millions in size.
  • The intersection must be very fast. Prometheus/Thanos will do intersections many more times than encode/decode data. It’s not uncommon to have 3+ label matchers in a single query.

From all of the things I’ve looked at, S4-BP128-D4 and roaring bitmaps look the most promising. The latter is used by a lot of similar projects already like M3DB. The former might be not so popular but it is specifically designed for SIMD which gives us very fast encoding/decoding.

I even started writing a Go version of S4-BP128-D4 but I haven’t finished it, yet: https://github.com/GiedriusS/go-bp. So, I am opting to try roaring bitmaps first. Even then it would be a huge improvement because bitmaps allow VERY fast intersection through the bitwise AND operation. The current intersection algorithm needs to step through each element in given postings.

I recently wrote a small program to compare postings compression on Prometheus index files: https://github.com/thanos-io/postings-analyzer. You can see that it is possible to save around ~70% in postings size using S4-BP128-D4 and ~47% using roaring bitmaps. These numbers were consistent in my tests using index files from production. In my case, this would lead to shaving about 30% of the whole index file. Of course, most notably my index files didn’t have any runs of numbers so run-length encoding wasn’t used in roaring bitmaps, and so one could argue that I don’t have a diverse data set in these tests. Perhaps there is some weird setup out there where RLE would be useful? I tried to gather sample index files on CNCF Slack to no avail – no one stepped up to upload them for me.

Either way, all of this work is very promising and I hope to have a feature flag in Thanos soon which would allow using roaring bitmaps!

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