prom-label-proxy

The prom-label-proxy can enforce a given label in a given PromQL query, in Prometheus API responses or in Alertmanager API requests. As an example (but not only), this allows read multi-tenancy for projects like Prometheus, Alertmanager or Thanos.

This proxy does not perform authentication or authorization, this has to happen before the request reaches this proxy, allowing you to use any authN/authZ system you want. The kube-rbac-proxy is an example for such an additional building block.

Risks outside the scope of this project:

It's not a goal for this project to solve write tenant isolation for multi-tenant Prometheus:

• If a tenant controls its scrape target configuration the tenant can set arbitrary labels via its relabelling configuration, thereby being able to pollute other tenant's metrics.
• If the ingestion configuration honor_labels is set for a tenant's target, that target can pollute other tenant's metrics as Prometheus respects any labels exposed by the target.

See Prometheus Operator label enforcement, Thanos soft/hard tenancy or Cortex as example solution to that.

Installing prom-label-proxy:

Docker

We publish docker images for each release, see:

• quay.io/prometheuscommunity/prom-label-proxy for newest images
• quay.io/coreos/prom-label-proxy:v0.1.0 for the initial v0.1.0 release.

Building from source

If you want to build prom-label-proxy from source you would need a working installation of the Go 1.15+ toolchain (GOPATH, PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:${PATH}).

prom-label-proxy can be downloaded and built by running:

go get github.com/prometheus-community/prom-label-proxy

How does this project work?

This application proxies the /federate, /api/v1/query, /api/v1/query_range, /api/v1/series, /api/v1/labels, /api/v1/label/<name>/values, /api/v1/rules, /api/v1/alerts Prometheus endpoints as well as /api/v2/silences Alertmanager endpoint and it ensures that a particular label is enforced in the particular request and response.

Particularly, you can run prom-label-proxy with label tenant and point to example, demo Prometheus server e.g:

prom-label-proxy \
   -label tenant \
   -upstream http://demo.do.prometheus.io:9090 \
   -insecure-listen-address 127.0.0.1:8080

Accessing demo Prometheus APIs on 127.0.0.1:8080 will now expect tenant query parameter to be set in the URL:

➜  ~ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/query\?query="up"
Bad request. The "tenant" query parameter must be provided.
➜  ~ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/query\?query="up"\&tenant\="something"
{"status":"success","data":{"resultType":"vector","result":[]}}%   

Once again for clarity: this project only enforces a particular label in the respective calls to Prometheus, it in itself does not authenticate or authorize the requesting entity in any way, this has to be built around this project.

Federate endpoint

The proxy ensures that all selectors passed as matchers to the /federate endpoint must contain that exact match of the particular label (and throws away all other matchers for the label).

Query endpoints

For the two query endpoints (/api/v1/query and /api/v1/query_range), the proxy parses the PromQL expression and modifies all selectors in the same way. The label-key is configured as a flag on the binary and the label-value is passed as a query parameter.

For example, if requesting the PromQL query

http_requests_total{namespace=~"a.*"}

and specifying the namespace label must be enforced to b, then the query will be re-written to

http_requests_total{namespace="b"}

This is enforced for any case, whether a label matcher is specified in the original query or not.

Metadata endpoints

Similar to query endpoint, for metadata endpoints /api/v1/series, /api/v1/labels, /api/v1/label/<name>/values the proxy injects the specified label all the provided match[] selectors.

NOTE: At the moment of creation /api/v1/labels, /api/v1/label/<name>/values does not support match[] so they are disabled by default. Use -enable-label-apis flag to enable those (see prometheus/prometheus#6178 for tracking development).

Rules endpoint

The proxy requests the /api/v1/rules Prometheus endpoint, discards the rules that don't contain an exact match of the label and returns the modified response to the client.

Alerts endpoint

The proxy requests the /api/v1/alerts Prometheus endpoint, discards the rules that don't contain an exact match of the label and returns the modified response to the client.

Silences endpoint

The proxy ensures the following:

• GET requests to the /api/v2/silences endpoint contain a filter parameter that matches exactly the particular label and throws away all other matchers for the label.
• POST requests to the /api/v2/silences endpoint can only affect silences that match the label and the label matcher is enforced.
• DELETE requests to the /api/v2/silence/ endpoint can only affect silences that match the label.

Example use

The concrete setup being shipped in OpenShift starting with 4.0: the proxy is configured to work with the label-key: namespace. In order to ensure that this is secure is it paired with the kube-rbac-proxy and its URL rewrite functionality, meaning first ServiceAccount token authentication is performed, and then the kube-rbac-proxy authorization to see whether the requesting entity is allowed to retrieve the metrics for the requested namespace. The RBAC role we chose to authorize against is the same as the Kubernetes Resource Metrics API, the reasoning being, if an entity can kubectl top pod in a namespace, it can see cAdvisor metrics (container_memory_rss, container_cpu_usage_seconds_total, etc.).