Open source, horizontally scalable Prometheus as a service

Cortex is a Weaveworks project that forms the monitoring backend of Weave Cloud.

It provides horizontally scalable, long term storage for Prometheus metrics when used as a remote write destination, and a horizontally scalable, Prometheus-compatible query API.

To use Cortex, sign up for Weave Cloud and follow the instructions there.

Additional help can also be found in the Weave Cloud documentation:

• Installing the Weave Cloud Agents
• Prometheus Monitoring in Weave Cloud
• Instrumenting Your App: Best Practises

Developing

To build & test, install minikube, and run:

eval $(minikube docker-env)
make
kubectl create -f ./k8s

Cortex will sit behind an nginx instance exposed on port 30080. A job is deployed to scrape it itself. Try it:

http://192.168.99.100:30080/api/prom/api/v1/query?query=up

Experimental Bazel builds

We also have early support for Bazel builds. Once you have installed bazel, try these commands:

make bazel-test
make bazel

This will require Bazel 0.5.4 or later.

Bazel can be useful for running fast, local, incremental builds and tests. Currently bazel does not support cross-compiling so it is not used to produce the final binaries and docker container images.

Vendoring

We use dep to vendor dependencies. To fetch a new dependency, run:

make update-vendor

To update dependencies, run

dep ensure --update && make update-vendor

Further reading

To learn more about Cortex, consult the following documents / talks:

• Original design document for Project Frankenstein
• PromCon 2016 Talk: "Project Frankenstein: Multitenant, Scale-Out Prometheus": video, slides
• KubeCon Prometheus Day talk "Weave Cortex: Multi-tenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus as a Service" slides

Getting Help

If you have any questions regarding Cortex, or on using Prometheus with Weave Cloud:

• Ask a question on the #weave-community Slack channel. To invite yourself to the Weave Community Slack channel, visit https://weaveworks.github.io/community-slack/.
• Join the Weave User Group and get invited to online talks, hands-on training and meetups in your area.
• Send an email to weave-users@weave.works
• File an issue.

Your feedback is always welcome.