Thanos 0.32: Highly Available Prometheus Evolution and Performance

Introduction

Thanos 0.32, released on December 5, 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.

Query Performance Improvements

• Query engine optimizations reduce latency for complex PromQL queries across multiple Prometheus instances.
• Caching improvements enable faster repeated queries with intelligent cache invalidation.
• Deduplication enhancements provide faster query results with better accuracy.
• Parallel execution improves performance for queries spanning multiple time ranges.

Storage Integration

1. Object storage improvements expand support for S3, GCS, Azure Blob, and other backends.
2. Compaction enhancements provide better storage efficiency and query performance.
3. Retention policies enable more flexible data lifecycle management.
4. Tiered storage support enables cost-effective long-term metric retention.

Multi-Cluster Support

• Federation improvements simplify querying metrics across multiple clusters.
• Service discovery enhancements automatically discover Prometheus instances.
• Replication capabilities enable metric replication across clusters.
• Query federation enables unified querying of metrics across cluster boundaries.

Reliability & Resilience

• High availability improvements provide better failover and recovery capabilities.
• Data integrity enhancements ensure metric consistency across replicas.
• Health monitoring improvements provide better visibility into component health.
• Backup capabilities enable faster recovery from failures.

Getting Started

helm repo add thanos https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm install thanos thanos/thanos --version 0.32.0

Configure Thanos Sidecar:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: prometheus
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: prometheus
        image: prom/prometheus:latest
      - name: thanos-sidecar
        image: quay.io/thanos/thanos:v0.32.0
        args:
        - sidecar
        - --prometheus.url=http://localhost:9090
        - --tsdb.path=/var/prometheus

Summary

Thanos 0.32 provides teams with robust, highly available Prometheus capabilities for enterprise-scale monitoring across clusters.