Shipping mixins

[Julien Pivotto]

Dear developers,

What would you think about shipping the mixins with the Prometheus
(&exporters) releases? Maybe e.g. a minimum compiled version of the
alerting rules, which would work nicely in the default prometheus.yml
file..

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Julien Pivotto
@roidelapluie

[Julius Volz]

I assume that with "the mixins", you mean the ones at https://monitoring.mixins.dev/ / https://github.com/monitoring-mixins/docs.

Shipping such rule and dashboard templates along with the software that exposes the metrics that they work for was part of my initial idea many years ago in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oXfthGcAOMriy7PEqrq_E8ecz1U_Jyn3QYqEWoHN7S8/edit#

Quote from that document:

"During the experimental phase, we should probably start with a centralized repository that is clearly marked as experimental (and might go away). This enables quick iteration and experimentation with the example bundles, until we get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. When the example bundle format becomes more settled and people agree on the usefulness of the concept, we should consider hosting the examples in decentralized fashion, together with the exporting components."

So if we think that the overall way of structuring mixins has become relatively stable, it might be time for that second phase. I'm not personally involved enough with the current jsonnet mixins efforts to judge that, but I'm sure others can.

Cheers,

Julius

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Julius Volz

PromLabs - promlabs.com

[Frederic Branczyk]

I've thought for quite some time about how the experience around mixins could maybe be improved. I'm not sure pre-compiled versions are necessarily the best thing. I think there can be a more dynamic yet equally convenient solution to this. Something that I've thought about a bit is something that in my head I call "auto discovery", where mixins could define a query which discovers label selectors that it might be applicable to. For example for the prometheus-mixin that could be `prometheus_build_info`, this is still a heuristic but tends to be a very accurate one, and is just a suggestion, a user would still make the final decision.

More generally speaking I think there is still a good amount of room for improvement on user experience around mixins, but there are many people interested in this, so I'd be more than happy to talk to anyone who wants to go over more details and we could build some tooling to make this reality.

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