Prometheus hits 2.0, brings massive performance improvements

A lot of companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus and the project quickly gained an active developer and user community. If you want to know more about the operational simplicity of Prometheus and find out why it is such a good fit for monitoring containers and microservices, you need to read this interview with Björn Rabenstein, Production Engineer at SoundCloud and one of the main Prometheus developers.

We already covered Prometheus 2.0 back in May when the team revealed some interesting details about the then-unreleased 2.0 version. We told you that Prometheus 2.0 had a different ace up its sleeve— a new storage layer meant to dramatically increases monitoring scalability for Kubernetes and other distributed systems.

SEE ALSO: Prometheus 1.0 — “Prometheus and Kubernetes share spiritual ancestry” [Interview with Björn Rabenstein]

Prometheus 2.0 is here

The big moment has arrived — Prometheus 2.0 is here. Fabian Reinartz, Staff Software Engineer at ‎CoreOS wrote in a blog post on behalf of the Prometheus team that “what first began as an experiment for a new, more performant time series database quickly got confirmed in practical benchmarks.”

The team stabilized this work as an independent time series database and re-integrated it into Prometheus itself, which led to the creation of a better performing Prometheus 2.0.

The new storage engine […] uses an inverted index, inspired by full text search, to provide fast lookups across the arbitrary dimensions that time series in Prometheus may have. A new disk format ensures good collocation of related time series data, while a write-ahead log makes Prometheus 2.0 resilient to crashes. As a result, Prometheus has also become easier to operate.

Fabian Reinartz

SEE ALSO: Prometheus monitoring: Pros and cons

Still, the most impressive improvement in version 2.0 is the amount of data written to disk/second. The new version writes up to two orders of magnitude less data to disk which increases the SSDs’ lifetime, which, in turn, lowers costs.

Furthermore, query latency is now more consistent and scales better in the face of high series. “Prometheus 2.0 maintains stable performance from the beginning, which leads to significantly more responsive queries,” Reinartz explained.

Prometheus 2 is still the Prometheus you have learned to love — just a lot faster and even easier to operate and use.

If you want to see the full list of changes and learn how to migrate from Prometheus 1.x, check out the official announcement and the migration guidelines.