Selecting specific lables from Prometheus metrics

[Hello World]

Hi All,

Let us assume that we have some metrics like this,

up {instance="instance1", job="job1", namespace="namespace1", svc_name="first_service"}

up {instance="instance1", job="job2", namespace="namespace2", svc_name="second_service"}

is there a way to select specific labels from the server instead of getting all the labels in the result? like the svc_name, namespace.etc

something like this,

up{namespace="namespace1", svc_name="first_service"}

up{namespace="namespace2", svc_name="second_service"}

This is like selecting a couple of columns from a table containing 20 columns.

Thanks.

[Hello World]

This is not filtering the labels by values here I only want to select couple of labels in the results instead of getting all the labels over the wire.

Also, I'm not using this for visualization, I'm trying to write a backend API which fetches the data from prometheus and runs some business logic on the data.

Thanks for your time.

[Matt Wilder]

You need to aggregate the data.  Most likely what you are looking for (given your example) is

sum by (namespace, svc_name) up

If sum is not the right aggregation, you can use any of the aggregation operators.

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[Hello World]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response.

Is there a way to select all the values without any aggregation?

Similar to what we do in database applications,

Movies

Name             Director                  Year                 IMDB_Rating

   X1                     Y1                      2020                       9.1

   X2                     Y2                      2021                       8.4

   X3                     Y3                      2019                       7.6

Now, an API is only interested in the Names and Years of all the titles, so, we just want to select Name and Year from the above table, and the result should look something like this

Name             Year

   X1               2020

   X2               2021

   X3               2019

is this possible with Prometheus? This would be very useful as we would transfer only the required fields over the network. 

[Matt Wilder]

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 10:58 AM Hello World <misc.he...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response.

Is there a way to select all the values without any aggregation?

Similar to what we do in database applications,

Movies

Name             Director                  Year                 IMDB_Rating

   X1                     Y1                      2020                       9.1

   X2                     Y2                      2021                       8.4

   X3                     Y3                      2019                       7.6

Now, an API is only interested in the Names and Years of all the titles, so, we just want to select Name and Year from the above table, and the result should look something like this

Name             Year

   X1               2020

   X2               2021

   X3               2019

Given this example, sum by (Name, Year) will give you exactly what you want.  

You can't drop labels from a tsdb query without doing aggregation, because the query would lose information.

In the above example, what would happen if a movie had two directors?

The Prometheus TSDB is not a general purpose database like MySQL, it is specifically designed around storing numerical values with labels.

If all you care about is purely the values of the Name and Year labels, then you should use the labels and values APIs.

<prom host:port>/api/v1/label/Name/values

<prom host:port>/api/v1/label/Year/values

 

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