Prometheus 2.46: Native Histograms Production Ready and Performance Enhancements

Introduction

Prometheus 2.46, released on August 20, 2024, brings native histograms to production readiness, delivers significant performance improvements, and enhances remote write capabilities. This release makes Prometheus more efficient and capable of handling larger-scale monitoring deployments.

Native Histograms Production Ready

• Native histogram support provides efficient storage and querying of distribution data without approximation.
• Automatic bucket selection eliminates the need for manual bucket configuration.
• Query performance improvements enable fast percentile and quantile calculations on histogram data.
• Backward compatibility ensures smooth migration from traditional histograms to native histograms.

Performance Enhancements

1. Query optimization reduces query execution time through improved index usage and caching.
2. Storage efficiency improvements reduce disk usage while maintaining query performance.
3. Scrape performance optimizations reduce CPU usage during metric collection.
4. Memory management enhancements improve stability for long-running Prometheus instances.

Remote Write Improvements

• Batching optimizations improve throughput and reduce network overhead for remote write operations.
• Retry logic enhancements provide more reliable delivery of metrics to remote storage systems.
• Compression improvements reduce bandwidth usage for remote write operations.
• Queue management provides better visibility and control over remote write queues.

Query Language Enhancements

• New functions expand PromQL capabilities for advanced metric analysis.
• Performance improvements accelerate complex query execution.
• Error handling provides better feedback for invalid queries.
• Documentation improvements make PromQL more accessible to users.

Storage & Retention

• Compaction improvements optimize storage usage and query performance.
• Retention policies provide more flexible data retention configuration.
• Snapshot capabilities enable efficient backup and restore operations.
• Block management optimizations improve storage efficiency for long-term retention.

Getting Started

# Download Prometheus
wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.46.0/prometheus-2.46.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xvfz prometheus-2.46.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd prometheus-2.46.0.linux-amd64

# Start Prometheus
./prometheus --config.file=prometheus.yml

Example configuration with native histograms:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
  evaluation_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'kubernetes-pods'
    kubernetes_sd_configs:
    - role: pod
    relabel_configs:
    - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_scrape]
      action: keep
      regex: true
    - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_path]
      action: replace
      target_label: __metrics_path__
      regex: (.+)

Summary

Prometheus 2.46 continues to evolve as the foundation of cloud-native monitoring, providing teams with efficient and powerful tools for observability at scale.