Prometheus 3.8.0 is released

[Jan Fajerski]

We are pleased to announce that Prometheus v3.8.0 is released.

Prometheus v3.8.0 is the first release with Native Histograms as a
stable feature.

Scraping Native Histograms has to be activated explicitly via the
scrape_native_histogram config setting (newly introduced in this
release). To ease the transition, the
--enable-feature=native-histograms flag is not a complete no-op in
this release, but changes the default value of scrape_native_histogram
to true. In the next release (v3.9), the feature flag will be a
complete no-op, and the default value of scrape_native_histogram will
always be false. If you have been using the feature flag so far, the
recommended course of action is the following:

Upgrade to v3.8 and keep the feature flag. Everything should work as before.
At your own pace, set scrape_native_histogram to true in all relevant
scrape configs. (There is a global and a per-scrape-config version of
scrape_native_histogram, allowing granular control if needed. It is a
good idea to also set scrape_native_histogram explicitly to false
where you do not want to scrape Native Histograms. In this way, you do
not depend on the default value of the setting anymore.)
Remove the feature flag and make sure that everything still works as intended.
Now you are ready for an upgrade to the next release (v3.9).

Additionally there are a number of behavior changes and new features
in this release:

[CHANGE] Remote-write 2 (receiving): Update to 2.0-rc.4 spec. "created
timestamp" (CT) is now called "start timestamp" (ST). #17411
[CHANGE] TSDB: Native Histogram Custom Bounds with a NaN threshold are
now rejected. #17287
[FEATURE] OAuth2: support jwt-bearer grant-type (RFC7523 3.1). #17592
[FEATURE] Dockerfile: Add OpenContainers spec labels to Dockerfile. #16483
[FEATURE] SD: Add unified AWS service discovery for ec2, lightsail and
ecs services. #17046
[FEATURE] Native histograms are now a stable, but optional feature,
use the scrape_native_histogram config setting. #17232 #17315
[FEATURE] UI: Support anchored and smoothed keyword in promql editor. #17239
[FEATURE] UI: Show detailed relabeling steps for each discovered target. #17337
[FEATURE] Alerting: Add urlQueryEscape to template functions. #17403
[FEATURE] Promtool: Add Remote-Write 2.0 support to promtool push
metrics via the --protobuf_message flag. #17417

There are currently no know breaking changes and of course many
enhancements, performance improvements and bug fixes.

The full changelog and binaries are available at
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.8.0

As usual, container images are available at
https://hub.docker.com/r/prom/prometheus/tags?name=v3.8.0 and
https://quay.io/repository/prometheus/prometheus?tab=tags.

Best,
Jan

[Jan Fajerski]

Hi Prometheus community,
unfortunately we made a mistake with our previous release announcement. In Prometheus v3.8.0 the Native Histograms feature is declared stable. The feature is activated via a scrape config setting "scrape_native_histograms".
In the original announce email we refer multiple times to this setting but calling it "scrape_native_histogram".
This is an error, the setting is called "scrape_native_histograms".

The release notes for the v3.8.0 release have been fixed: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.8.0

If you rely on the soon to be deprecated feature flag "--enable-feature=native-histograms" and have started to transition you scrape configs, please make sure to update the relevant scrape_configs to use "scrape_native_histograms".

Best,

Jan