Prometheus Pushgateway

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The Prometheus Pushgateway exists to allow ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Since these kinds of jobs may not exist long enough to be scraped, they can instead push their metrics to a Pushgateway. The Pushgateway then exposes these metrics to Prometheus.

Non-goals

First of all, the Pushgateway is not capable of turning Prometheus into a push-based monitoring system. For a general description of use cases for the Pushgateway, please read When To Use The Pushgateway.

The Pushgateway is explicitly not an aggregator or distributed counter but rather a metrics cache. It does not have statsd-like semantics. The metrics pushed are exactly the same as you would present for scraping in a permanently running program. If you need distributed counting, you could either use the actual statsd in combination with the Prometheus statsd exporter, or have a look at the prom-aggregation-gateway. With more experience gathered, the Prometheus project might one day be able to provide a native solution, separate from or possibly even as part of the Pushgateway.

For machine-level metrics, the textfile collector of the Node exporter is usually more appropriate. The Pushgateway is intended for service-level metrics.

The Pushgateway is not an event store. While you can use Prometheus as a data source for Grafana annotations, tracking something like release events has to happen with some event-logging framework.

A while ago, we decided to not implement a “timeout” or TTL for pushed metrics because almost all proposed use cases turned out to be anti-patterns we strongly discourage. You can follow a more recent discussion on the prometheus-developers mailing list.

Run it

Download binary releases for your platform from the release page and unpack the tarball.

If you want to compile yourself from the sources, you need a working Go setup. Then use the provided Makefile (type make).

For the most basic setup, just start the binary. To change the address to listen on, use the --web.listen-address flag (e.g. "0.0.0.0:9091" or ":9091"). By default, Pushgateway does not persist metrics. However, the --persistence.file flag allows you to specify a file in which the pushed metrics will be persisted (so that they survive restarts of the Pushgateway).

Using Docker

You can deploy the Pushgateway using the prom/pushgateway Docker image.

For example:

docker pull prom/pushgateway

docker run -d -p 9091:9091 prom/pushgateway

More documentation

Please refer to the full length README.md for more documentation.