opentelemetry-exporter-prometheus-remote-write 0.17b0

Prometheus Remote Write Metrics Exporter for OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry Prometheus Remote Write Exporter

This package contains an exporter to send OTLP metrics from the OpenTelemetry Python SDK directly to a Prometheus Remote Write integrated backend (such as Cortex or Thanos) without having to run an instance of the Prometheus server. The latest types.proto and remote.proto protocol buffers are used to create the WriteRequest. The image below shows the two Prometheus exporters in the OpenTelemetry Python SDK.

Pipeline 1 illustrates the setup required for a Prometheus “pull” exporter.

Pipeline 2 illustrates the setup required for the Prometheus Remote Write exporter.

The Prometheus Remote Write Exporter is a “push” based exporter and only works with the OpenTelemetry push controller. The controller periodically collects data and passes it to the exporter. This exporter then converts the data into timeseries and sends it to the Remote Write integrated backend through HTTP POST requests. The metrics collection datapath is shown below:

See the examples folder for a demo usage of this exporter

Table of Contents

• Summary

• Table of Contents

  • Installation

  • Quickstart

  • Examples

  • Configuring the Exporter

  • Securing the Exporter

    • Authentication

    • TLS

  • Supported Aggregators

  • Error Handling

  • Contributing

    • Design Doc

Installation

Prerequisites

1. Install the snappy c-library

   DEB: sudo apt-get install libsnappy-dev

   RPM: sudo yum install libsnappy-devel

   OSX/Brew: brew install snappy

   Windows: pip install python_snappy-0.5-cp36-cp36m-win_amd64.whl

Exporter

• To install from the latest PyPi release, run pip install opentelemetry-exporter-prometheus-remote-write

Quickstart

from opentelemetry import metrics
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics import MeterProvider
from opentelemetry.exporter.prometheus_remote_write import (
    PrometheusRemoteWriteMetricsExporter
)

# Sets the global MeterProvider instance
metrics.set_meter_provider(MeterProvider())

# The Meter is responsible for creating and recording metrics. Each meter has a unique name, which we set as the module's name here.
meter = metrics.get_meter(__name__)

exporter = PrometheusRemoteWriteMetricsExporter(endpoint="endpoint_here") # add other params as needed

metrics.get_meter_provider().start_pipeline(meter, exporter, 5)

Examples

This example uses Docker Compose to set up:

1. A Python program that creates 5 instruments with 5 unique aggregators and a randomized load generator

2. An instance of Cortex to recieve the metrics data

3. An instance of Grafana to visualizse the exported data

Requirements

• Have Docker Compose installed

Users do not need to install Python as the app will be run in the Docker Container

Instructions

1. Run docker-compose up -d in the the examples/ directory

The -d flag causes all services to run in detached mode and frees up your terminal session. This also causes no logs to show up. Users can attach themselves to the service’s logs manually using docker logs ${CONTAINER_ID} --follow

2. Log into the Grafana instance at http://localhost:3000

   • login credentials are username: admin and password: admin

   • There may be an additional screen on setting a new password. This can be skipped and is optional

3. Navigate to the Data Sources page

   • Look for a gear icon on the left sidebar and select Data Sources

4. Add a new Prometheus Data Source

   • Use http://cortex:9009/api/prom as the URL

   • Set the scrape interval to 2s to make updates appear quickly (Optional)

   • click Save & Test

5. Go to Metrics Explore to query metrics

   • Look for a compass icon on the left sidebar

   • click Metrics for a dropdown list of all the available metrics

   • Adjust time range by clicking the Last 6 hours button on the upper right side of the graph (Optional)

   • Set up auto-refresh by selecting an option under the dropdown next to the refresh button on the upper right side of the graph (Optional)

   • Click the refresh button and data should show up on hte graph

6. Shutdown the services when finished

   • Run docker-compose down in the examples directory

Configuring the Exporter

The exporter can be configured through parameters passed to the constructor. Here are all the options:

• endpoint: url where data will be sent (Required)

• basic_auth: username and password for authentication (Optional)

• headers: additional headers for remote write request as determined by the remote write backend’s API (Optional)

• timeout: timeout for requests to the remote write endpoint in seconds (Optional)

• proxies: dict mapping request proxy protocols to proxy urls (Optional)

• tls_config: configuration for remote write TLS settings (Optional)

Example with all the configuration options:

exporter = PrometheusRemoteWriteMetricsExporter(
    endpoint="http://localhost:9009/api/prom/push",
    timeout=30,
    basic_auth={
        "username": "user",
        "password": "pass123",
    },
    headers={
        "X-Scope-Org-ID": "5",
        "Authorization": "Bearer mytoken123",
    },
    proxies={
        "http": "http://10.10.1.10:3000",
        "https": "http://10.10.1.10:1080",
    },
    tls_config={
        "cert_file": "path/to/file",
        "key_file": "path/to/file",
        "ca_file": "path_to_file",
        "insecure_skip_verify": true, # for developing purposes
    }
)

Securing the Exporter

Authentication

The exporter provides two forms of authentication which are shown below. Users can add their own custom authentication by setting the appropriate values in the headers dictionary

1. Basic Authentication Basic authentication sets a HTTP Authorization header containing a base64 encoded username/password pair. See RFC 7617 for more information. This

exporter = PrometheusRemoteWriteMetricsExporter(
    basic_auth={"username": "base64user",  "password": "base64pass"}
)

2. Bearer Token Authentication This custom configuration can be achieved by passing in a custom header to the constructor. See RFC 6750 for more information.

header = {
    "Authorization": "Bearer mytoken123"
}

TLS

Users can add TLS to the exporter’s HTTP Client by providing certificate and key files in the tls_config parameter.

Supported Aggregators

Behaviour of these aggregators is outlined in the OpenTelemetry Specification. All aggregators are converted into the timeseries data format. However, method in which they are converted differs from aggregator to aggregator. A map of the conversion methods can be found here.

OpenTelemetry Aggregator	Equivalent Prometheus Data Type	Behaviour
Sum	Counter	Metric value can only go up or be reset to 0
MinMaxSumCount	Gauge	Metric value can arbitrarily increment or decrement
Histogram	Histogram	Unlike the Prometheus histogram, the OpenTelemetry Histogram does not provide a sum of all observed values
LastValue	N/A	Metric only contains the most recently observed value
ValueObserver	N/A	Similar to MinMaxSumCount but also contains LastValue

Error Handling

In general, errors are raised by the calling function. The exception is for failed requests where any error status code is logged as a warning instead.

This is because the exporter does not implement any retry logic as data that failed to export will be dropped.

For example, consider a situation where a user increments a Counter instrument 5 times and an export happens between each increment. If the exports happen like so:

SUCCESS FAIL FAIL SUCCESS SUCCESS
1       2    3    4       5

Then the received data will be:

1 4 5

Contributing

If you would like to learn more about the exporter’s structure and design decisions please view the design document below

Design Doc

Design Document

This document is stored elsewhere as it contains large images which will significantly increase the size of this repo.