cortex

Open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant Prometheus as a service

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

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

Multi-tenant means it handles metrics from multiple independent Prometheus sources, keeping them separate.

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:

make

(By default the build runs in a Docker container, using an image built with all the tools required. The source code is mounted from where you run make into the build container as a Docker volume.)

To run the test suite:

make test

To checkout Cortex in minikube:

kubectl create -f ./k8s

(these manifests use latest tags, i.e. this will work if you have just built the images and they are available on the node(s) in your Kubernetes cluster)

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

Vendoring

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

dep ensure

To update dependencies, run

dep ensure --update

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
• CNCF TOC Presentation; "Horizontally Scalable, Multi-tenant Prometheus" 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.