Overview

Thanos is a set of components that can be composed into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity, which can be added seamlessly on top of existing Prometheus deployments.

Thanos is a CNCF Incubating project.

Thanos leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost-efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and can merge data from Prometheus HA pairs on the fly.

Concretely the aims of the project are:

1. Global query view of metrics.
2. Unlimited retention of metrics.
3. High availability of components, including Prometheus.

Getting Started

• Getting Started
• Design
• Blog posts
• Talks
• Proposals
• Integrations

Features

• Global querying view across all connected Prometheus servers
• Deduplication and merging of metrics collected from Prometheus HA pairs
• Seamless integration with existing Prometheus setups
• Any object storage as its only, optional dependency
• Downsampling historical data for massive query speedup
• Cross-cluster federation
• Fault-tolerant query routing
• Simple gRPC "Store API" for unified data access across all metric data
• Easy integration points for custom metric providers

Architecture Overview

Deployment with Sidecar:

Deployment with Receive:

Thanos Philosophy

The philosophy of Thanos and our community is borrowing much from UNIX philosophy and the golang programming language.

• Each subcommand should do one thing and do it well
  • eg. thanos query proxies incoming calls to known store API endpoints merging the result
• Write components that work together
  • e.g. blocks should be stored in native prometheus format
• Make it easy to read, write, and, run components
  • e.g. reduce complexity in system design and implementation

Releases

Main branch should be stable and usable. Every commit to main builds docker image named main-<date>-<sha> in quay.io/thanos/thanos and thanosio/thanos dockerhub (mirror)

We also perform minor releases every 6 weeks.

During that, we build tarballs for major platforms and release docker images.

See release process docs for details.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! See our CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

Community

Thanos is an open source project and we value and welcome new contributors and members of the community. Here are ways to get in touch with the community:

• Slack: #thanos
• Issue Tracker: GitHub Issues

Adopters

See Adopters List.

Maintainers

See MAINTAINERS.md