Prometheus 2.45: Native Histograms Production Ready and Performance

Introduction

Prometheus 2.45, released on June 12, 2023, is most relevant if your on-call needs clearer signals and faster root cause loops. You typically feel the difference during incidents: faster queries, better signal-to-noise in alerts, and more actionable context when tracing issues across services.

Native Histograms Production Ready

• Native histogram support provides efficient storage and querying of distribution data without approximation.
• Automatic bucketing reduces configuration overhead while maintaining query flexibility.
• Backward compatibility ensures smooth migration from traditional histogram metrics.
• Query performance improvements enable faster percentile calculations and distribution analysis.

Query Performance Improvements

1. Query engine optimizations reduce latency for complex PromQL queries by up to 50%.
2. Index improvements accelerate time-series lookups and label filtering.
3. Query caching enables faster repeated queries with intelligent cache invalidation.
4. Parallel execution improves performance for queries spanning multiple time ranges.

Storage Efficiency

• Compaction improvements reduce storage footprint while maintaining query performance.
• Retention policies enable more flexible data lifecycle management with tiered storage support.
• Memory usage optimizations reduce RAM requirements for large-scale deployments.
• WAL improvements accelerate write performance and recovery times.

Remote Write & Federation

• Remote write enhancements provide better reliability and performance for long-term storage integration.
• Federation improvements enable more efficient cross-prometheus querying and aggregation.
• TLS enhancements provide better security for remote write endpoints.
• Compression improvements reduce network bandwidth for remote write operations.

Kubernetes Integration

• Service discovery improvements automatically discover and monitor Kubernetes resources.
• Scrape configuration enhancements enable more flexible target selection and filtering.
• RBAC integration provides fine-grained access control for Prometheus resources.
• Operator compatibility ensures seamless integration with Prometheus Operator.

Getting Started

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack --version 45.0.0

Configure native histograms:

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 2.45 establishes new capabilities for observability, providing teams with efficient histogram support and improved query performance for enterprise monitoring.