Prometheus 2.28: Observability and Performance Advances

Introduction

Prometheus 2.28 — Observability and Performance Advances — was released on October 6, 2021.

In Kubernetes, the hard part isn’t collecting data — it’s turning traces, metrics, and logs into something you can act on quickly.

In this release: Prometheus 2.28 introduces improved query performance, enhanced remote write capabilities, and better resource efficiency for large-scale Kubernetes monitoring.

Query Performance Improvements

• Query engine optimizations reduce latency for complex PromQL queries, especially those involving large time ranges.
• Index improvements accelerate label and series lookups, improving query response times.
• Memory management enhancements reduce memory usage during query execution.
• Concurrent query handling improves throughput for high-query-load scenarios.

Remote Write Enhancements

1. Queue management improvements provide better backpressure handling and retry logic for remote storage backends.
2. Sharding enhancements enable more efficient distribution of metrics across remote write endpoints.
3. Compression support reduces bandwidth usage for remote write operations.
4. Error handling improvements provide better recovery from transient remote storage failures.

Resource Efficiency

• WAL (Write-Ahead Log) optimizations reduce disk I/O and improve startup times after restarts.
• Memory usage improvements reduce Prometheus footprint for resource-constrained environments.
• Scrape efficiency enhancements reduce CPU usage during metric collection.
• Storage optimizations improve compression and reduce disk space requirements.

Kubernetes Integration

• Service discovery improvements enhance automatic discovery of Kubernetes pods and services.
• Label management enhancements provide better handling of Kubernetes label changes.
• Scrape configuration improvements simplify setup for complex Kubernetes deployments.
• RBAC support enables secure metric collection with Kubernetes service accounts.

Operational Improvements

• Alerting refinements improve alert evaluation performance and reduce false positives.
• Recording rules optimizations reduce evaluation overhead for frequently used queries.
• Configuration validation provides better error messages for misconfigured scrape jobs.
• Documentation expansion includes comprehensive guides for common monitoring scenarios.

Getting Started

kubectl create namespace monitoring
kubectl apply -n monitoring -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator/v0.50.0/example/prometheus-operator-crd/monitoring.coreos.com_prometheuses.yaml

Configure Prometheus:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: prometheus-config
data:
  prometheus.yml: |
    global:
      scrape_interval: 15s
    scrape_configs:
    - job_name: 'kubernetes-pods'
      kubernetes_sd_configs:
      - role: pod

Summary

Prometheus 2.28 continues to evolve as the foundation of Kubernetes observability, providing teams with reliable metrics collection and querying capabilities at scale.