CAUTION: This page documents an old version of Prometheus. Check out the latest stable version.

Remote Read API

This is not currently considered par of the stable API and is subject to change even between non-major version releases of Prometheus.

Format overview

The API response format is JSON. Every successful API request returns a 2xx status code.

Invalid requests that reach the API handlers return a JSON error object and one of the following HTTP response codes:

• 400 Bad Request when parameters are missing or incorrect.
• 422 Unprocessable Entity when an expression can’t be executed (RFC4918).
• 503 Service Unavailable when queries time out or abort.

Other non-2xx codes may be returned for errors occurring before the API endpoint is reached.

An array of warnings may be returned if there are errors that do not inhibit the request execution. All of the data that was successfully collected will be returned in the data field.

The JSON response envelope format is as follows:

{
  "status": "success" | "error",
  "data": <data>,
  // Only set if status is "error". The data field may still hold
  // additional data.
  "errorType": "<string>",
  "error": "<string>",
  // Only if there were warnings while executing the request.
  // There will still be data in the data field.
  "warnings": ["<string>"]
}

Generic placeholders are defined as follows:

• <rfc3339 | unix_timestamp>: Input timestamps may be provided either in RFC3339 format or as a Unix timestamp in seconds, with optional decimal places for sub-second precision. Output timestamps are always represented as Unix timestamps in seconds.
• <series_selector>: Prometheus time series selectors like http_requests_total or http_requests_total{method=~"(GET|POST)"} and need to be URL-encoded.
• <duration>: Prometheus duration strings. For example, 5m refers to a duration of 5 minutes.
• <bool>: boolean values (strings true and false).

Note: Names of query parameters that may be repeated end with [].

Remote Read API

This API provides data read functionality from Prometheus. This interface expects snappy compression. The API definition is located here. /// Can you clarify what you mean by this? /// https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/7266#discussion_r426456791 Can we talk a little bit how negotiation works of sampled vs streamed ?

Request are made to the following endpoint. /api/v1/read

Samples

/// Does it return a message that includes a list, or does it return a list of raw samples?

This returns a message that includes a list of raw samples.

Streamed Chunks

/// This is a little much detail, the relevant point is they’re the internal implementation of the chunks.

These streamed chunks utilize an XOR algorithm inspired by the Gorilla compression to encode the chunks. However, it provides resolution to the millisecond instead of to the second.

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