Prometheus Remote Write

You can collect Prometheus metrics from environments where the Sysdig agent is not available. Sysdig uses the remote_write capabilities to help you do so.

In Sysdig terminology, the remote endpoints that can read Prometheus metrics are known as Prometheus Remote Write. Prometheus Remote Write does not require the Sysdig agent to be installed in the Prometheus environment. This facility expands your monitoring capabilities beyond Kubernetes and regular Linux kernels to environments where the Sysdig agent cannot be installed.

Prometheus Remote Write can collect metrics from:

• An existing Prometheus server

• Additional environments:

  • Windows

  • Managed Cloud Environments, such as AWS and IBM

  • Fargate

  • IoT

Use Sysdig agent in environments where an agent can be installed. However, use the Prometheus Remote Write to collect metrics from ephemeral or batch jobs that may not exist long enough to be scraped by the agent.

With the Prometheus Remote Write, you can either monitor metrics through the Monitor UI or you can use PromQL to query the data by using the standard Prometheus query language.

Endpoints and Regions

Prometheus Remote Write resides in the ingest endpoints for each region under /prometheus/remote/write. The public Prometheus Remote Write endpoints for each region are listed below:

Configure Remote Write in Prometheus Server

You need to configure remote_write in your Prometheus server in order to send metrics to Sysdig Prometheus Remote Write.

The configuration of your Prometheus server depends on your installation. In general, you configure the remote_write section in the prometheus.yml configuration file:

global:
  external_labels:
    [ <labelname>: <labelvalue> ... ]
remote_write:
    - url: "https://<region-url>/prometheus/remote/write"
      bearer_token: "<your API Token>"

The communication between your Prometheus server and Prometheus Remote Write should use the authorization header with the Sysdig API key (not the agent access key) as the bearer token.

Alternatively, you can also use the bearer_token_file entry to refer to a file instead of directly including the API token.

Customize Metrics

To enable customization, Sysdig provides additional options to control which metrics you want to send to Prometheus Remote Write.

Manage Metrics

Prometheus Remote Write by default sends all the metrics to Sysdig Prometheus Remote Write. These metrics are sent with a remote_write: true label appended to it so you can easily identify them.

Label Metrics

You can specify custom label-value pairs and send them with each time series to the Prometheus Remote Write. Use the external_labels block in the global section in the Prometheus configuration file. This is similar to setting an agent tag and allowing you to filter or scope the metrics in Sysdig Monitor.

For example, if you have two Prometheus servers configured to remote write to Prometheus Remote Write, you can include an external label to identify them easily:

Prometheus 1

global:
  external_labels:
    provider: prometheus1
remote_write:
- url: ...

Prometheus 2

global:
  external_labels:
    provider: prometheus2
remote_write:
- url: ...

Filter Metrics

With the general configuration, all the metrics are by default remotely written to Prometheus Remote Write. You can control the metrics that you collect and send to Sysdig. To select which series and labels to collect, drop, or replace, and reduce the number of active series that are sent to Sysdig, you can set up relabel configurations by using the write_relabel_configs block within your remote_write section.

For example, you can send metrics from one specific namespace called myapp-ns as give below:

remote_write:
- url: https://<region-url>/prometheus/remote/write
  bearer_token_file: /etc/secrets/sysdig-api-token
  write_relabel_configs:
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_namespace]
    regex: 'myapp-ns'
    action: keep

Rate Limit

The default limits are configured set for each user and can be raised as required. The defaults are good for most users, and the limits help protect against any misconfigurations.

Team Scoping

It is possible to scope a Sysdig Team to only access metrics matching certain labels sent via Prometheus remote write. See Manage Teams and Roles

Limitations

• Metrics sent to Prometheus Remote Write can be accessed in Explore, but they are not compatible with the scope tree.

• Label enrichment is unavailable at this point. Only labels collected at the source can be used. You should add additional labels to perform further scoping or pivoting in Sysdig.

• Currently, Sysdig Dashboards do not support mixing metrics with different sampling. For example, 10 seconds and 1-minute samples. For optimal experience, configure the scrape interval to be 10s to combine remote write metrics with agent metrics.

• Remote write functionality does not support sending metric metadata. Upstream Prometheus recently added support for propagation of metadata (metric type, unit, description, info) and this functionality will be supported in a future update to Prometheus Remote Write.

  • Suffix the metric name with _total, _sum , or _count to store them as a counter. Otherwise, the metrics will be handled as a gauge.

  • Units can be set in Dashboards manually.

Learn More

• Using PromQL

• Run PromQL Queries Faster with Extended Label Set

• PromQL Query Explorer

• PromQL Library

• PromQL Alerts