Serverless / Lambda / FaaS Apps + Prometheus

[Dave Cadwallader]

We're looking into replacing parts of our infrastructure with serverless functions.  Obviously we can't expose pull metrics for short-lived functions like this.  I was wondering if PushGateway is an appropriate choice for capturing metrics for these short-lived functions.

From the Prometheus docs and Robust Perception blog posts I know that PushGateway is generally considered to be an antipattern, and that the only valid use case is "collecting metrics from service-level batch jobs."

For a serverless architecture, would you recommend PushGateway, or a different solution altogether?  

One solution we considered since we're mostly an AWS shop at the moment was to have the functions push metrics to CloudWatch and then have Prometheus scrape cloudwatch.   But the problems with that are:

1) not vendor-agnostic

2) incurs cost

Thanks!

Dave

[Matt Palmer]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 02:51:36PM -0800, Dave Cadwallader wrote:
> From the Prometheus docs and Robust Perception blog posts I know that
> PushGateway is generally considered to be an antipattern, and that the only
> valid use case is "collecting metrics from service-level batch jobs."

Well, "serverless" is just batch jobs as a service...

- Matt

[Ben Kochie]

Without direct FaaS Prometheus support, you will have to hack something together yourself.  That's part of how they get you with costs and lock-in.  Sure the functions are cheap, but now you're stuck with CloudWatch.

One option would be to use an event aggregation gateway, for example:

https://github.com/weaveworks/prom-aggregation-gateway

Hopefully as function systems mature, we'll see better support for monitoring them as part of the various platforms.

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