2.6.0-rc.0

This release contains 255 PRs from 40 authors, including new contributors breadly7, bubu11e, Đurica Yuri Nikolić, Felix Beuke, Jack, klagroix, Martin Chodur, Ørjan Ommundsen, Sascha Sternheim, Wu Zhiyuan. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.6.0-rc.0 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.6.0-rc.0 of Grafana Mimir.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Features and enhancements

• Lower memory usage in store-gateway by streaming series results
  The store-gateway can now stream results back to the querier instead of buffering them. This is expected to greatly reduce peak memory consumption while keeping latency the same. This is still an experimental feature but Grafana Labs is already running it in production and there's no known issue. This feature can be enabled setting the -blocks-storage.bucket-store.batch-series-size configuration option (if you want to try it out, we recommend you setting to 5000).

• Improved stability in store-gateway by removing mmap usage
  The store-gateway can now use an alternate code path to read index-headers that does not use memory mapped files. This is expected to improve stability of the store-gateway. This is still an experimental feature but Grafana Labs is already running it in production and there's no known issue. This feature can be enabled setting -blocks-storage.bucket-store.index-header.stream-reader-enabled=true.

Alertmanager improvements

• Webex support Alertmanager can now use Webex to send alerts.

• tenantID template function A new template function tenantID, returning the ID of the tenant owning the alert, has been added.

• grafanaExploreURL template function A new template function grafanaExploreURL, returning the URL to the Grafana explore page with range query, has been added.

Helm chart improvements

The Grafana Mimir and Grafana Enterprise Metrics Helm chart is now released independently. See the corresponding documentation for more information.

Important changes

In Grafana Mimir 2.6 we have removed the following previously deprecated or experimental configuration options:

• The CLI flag -blocks-storage.bucket-store.max-concurrent-reject-over-limit and its respective YAML configuration option blocks_storage.bucket_store.max_concurrent_reject_over_limit.
• The CLI flag -query-frontend.align-querier-with-step and its respective YAML configuration option frontend.align_querier_with_step.

The following configuration options are deprecated and will be removed in Grafana Mimir 2.8:

• The CLI flag -store.max-query-length and its respective YAML configuration option limits.max_query_length have been replaced with -querier.max-partial-query-length and limits.max_partial_query_length.

The following experimental options and features are now stable:

• The CLI flag -query-frontend.max-total-query-length and its respective YAML configuration option limits.max_total_query_length.
• The CLI flags -distributor.request-rate-limit and -distributor.request-burst-limit and their respective YAML configuration options limits.request_rate_limit and limits.request_rate_burst.
• The CLI flag -ingester.max-global-exemplars-per-user and its respective YAML configuration option limits.max_global_exemplars_per_user.
• The CLI flag -ingester.tsdb-config-update-period its respective YAML configuration option ingester.tsdb_config_update_period.
• The API endpoint /api/v1/query_exemplars.

Bug fixes

• Alertmanager: Fix template spurious deletion with relative data dir. PR 3604
• Security: Update prometheus/exporter-toolkit for CVE-2022-46146. PR 3675
• Security: Update golang.org/x/net for CVE-2022-41717. PR 3755
• Debian package: Fix post-install, environment file path and user creation. PR 3720
• Memberlist: Fix panic during Mimir startup when Mimir receives gossip message before it's ready. PR 3746
• Update github.com/thanos-io/objstore to address issue with Multipart PUT on s3-compatible Object Storage. PR 3802 PR 3821
• Querier: Canceled requests are no longer reported as "consistency check" failures. PR 3837 PR 3927
• Distributor: Don't panic when metric_relabel_configs in overrides contains null element. PR 3868
• Ingester, Compactor: Fix panic that can occur when compaction fails. PR 3955

Changelog

2.6.0-rc.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Querier: Introduce -querier.max-partial-query-length to limit the time range for partial queries at the querier level and deprecate -store.max-query-length. #3825 #4017
• [CHANGE] Store-gateway: Remove experimental -blocks-storage.bucket-store.max-concurrent-reject-over-limit flag. #3706
• [CHANGE] Ingester: If shipping is enabled block retention will now be relative to the upload time to cloud storage. If shipping is disabled block retention will be relative to the creation time of the block instead of the mintime of the last block created. #3816
• [CHANGE] Query-frontend: Deprecated CLI flag -query-frontend.align-querier-with-step has been removed. #3982
• [FEATURE] Store-gateway: streaming of series. The store-gateway can now stream results back to the querier instead of buffering them. This is expected to greatly reduce peak memory consumption while keeping latency the same. You can enable this feature by setting -blocks-storage.bucket-store.batch-series-size to a value in the high thousands (5000-10000). This is still an experimental feature and is subject to a changing API and instability. #3540 #3546 #3587 #3606 #3611 #3620 #3645 #3355 #3697 #3666 #3687 #3728 #3739 #3751 #3779 #3839
• [FEATURE] Alertmanager: Added support for the Webex receiver. #3758
• [FEATURE] Limits: Added the -validation.separate-metrics-group-label flag. This allows further separation of the cortex_discarded_samples_total metric by an additional group label - which is configured by this flag to be the value of a specific label on an incoming timeseries. Active groups are tracked and inactive groups are cleaned up on a defined interval. The maximum number of groups tracked is controlled by the -max-separate-metrics-groups-per-user flag. #3439
• [FEATURE] Overrides-exporter: Added experimental ring support to overrides-exporter via -overrides-exporter.ring.enabled. When enabled, the ring is used to establish a leader replica for the export of limit override metrics. #3908 #3953
• [FEATURE] Ephemeral storage (experimental): Mimir can now accept samples into "ephemeral storage". Such samples are available for querying for a short amount of time (-blocks-storage.ephemeral-tsdb.retention-period, defaults to 10 minutes), and then removed from memory. To use ephemeral storage, distributor must be configured with -distributor.ephemeral-series-enabled option. Series matching -distributor.ephemeral-series-matchers will be marked for storing into ephemeral storage in ingesters. Each tenant needs to have ephemeral storage enabled by using -ingester.max-ephemeral-series-per-user limit, which defaults to 0 (no ephemeral storage). Ingesters have new -ingester.instance-limits.max-ephemeral-series limit for total number of series in ephemeral storage across all tenants. If ingestion of samples into ephemeral storage fails, cortex_discarded_samples_total metric will use values prefixed with ephemeral- for reason label. Querying of ephemeral storage is possible by using {__mimir_storage__="ephemeral"} as metric selector. Following new metrics related to ephemeral storage are introduced: #3897 #3922 #3961 #3997 #4004
  • cortex_ingester_ephemeral_series
  • cortex_ingester_ephemeral_series_created_total
  • cortex_ingester_ephemeral_series_removed_total
  • cortex_ingester_ingested_ephemeral_samples_total
  • cortex_ingester_ingested_ephemeral_samples_failures_total
  • cortex_ingester_memory_ephemeral_users
  • cortex_ingester_queries_ephemeral_total
  • cortex_ingester_queried_ephemeral_samples
  • cortex_ingester_queried_ephemeral_series
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added new metric thanos_shipper_last_successful_upload_time: Unix timestamp (in seconds) of the last successful TSDB block uploaded to the bucket. #3627
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ruler: Added -ruler.alertmanager-client.tls-enabled configuration for alertmanager client. #3432 #3597
• [ENHANCEMENT] Activity tracker logs now have component=activity-tracker label. #3556
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: remove labels with empty values #2439
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: track query HTTP requests in the Activity Tracker. #3561
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: Add experimental alternate implementation of index-header reader that does not use memory mapped files. The index-header reader is expected to improve stability of the store-gateway. You can enable this implementation with the flag -blocks-storage.bucket-store.index-header.stream-reader-enabled. #3639 #3691 #3703 #3742 #3785 #3787 #3797
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-scheduler: add cortex_query_scheduler_cancelled_requests_total metric to track the number of requests that are already cancelled when dequeued. #3696
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: add `cortex_bucket_store_partitioner_ex...

2.5.0

This release contains 230 PRs from 43 authors, including new contributors Aldo D'Aquino, Anıl Mısırlıoğlu, Charles Korn, Danny Staple, Dylan Crees, Eduardo Silvi, FG, Jesse Weaver, KarlisAG, Leegin-darknight, Rohan Kumar, Wille Faler, Y.Horie, manohar-koukuntla, paulroche, songjiayang, Éamon Ryan. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.5 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.5 of Grafana Mimir.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Features and enhancements

• Alertmanager Discord support
  Alertmanager can now be configured to send alerts in Discord channels.

• Configurable TLS minimum version and cipher suites
  We added the flags -server.tls-min-version and -server.tls-cipher-suites that can be used to define the minimum TLS version and the supported cipher suites in all HTTP and gRPC servers in Mimir.

• Lower memory usage in store-gateway, ingester and alertmanager
  We made various changes related to how index lookups are performed and how the active series custom trackers are implemented, which results in better performance and lower overall memory usage in the store-gateway and ingester.
  We also optimized the alertmanager, which results in a 50% reduction in memory usage in use cases with larger numbers of tenants.

• Improved Mimir dashboards
  We added two new dashboards named Mimir / Overview resources and Mimir / Overview networking. Furthermore, we have made various improvements to the following existing dashboards:

  • Mimir / Overview: Add "remote read", "metadata", and "exemplar" queries.
  • Mimir / Writes: Add optional row about the distributor's new forwarding feature.
  • Mimir / Tenants: Add insights into the read path.

Helm chart improvements

• Zone aware replication
  Helm now supports deploying the ingesters and store-gateways as different availability zones. The replication is also zone-aware, therefore multiple instances of one zone can fail without any service interruption and roll outs can be performed faster because many instances of each zone can be restarted together, as opposed to them all restarting in sequence.

  This is a breaking change, for details on how to upgrade please review the Helm changelog.

• Running without root privileges
  All Mimir, GEM and Agent processes now don't require root privileges to run anymore.

• Unified reverse proxy (gateway) configuration for Mimir and GEM
  This change allows for an easier upgrade path from Mimir to GEM, without any downtime. The unified configuration also makes it possible to autoscale the GEM gateway pods and it supports OpenShift Route. The change also deprecates the nginx section in the configuration. The section will be removed in release 7.0.0.

• Updated MinIO
  The MinIO sub-chart was updated from 4.x to 5.0.0, note that this update inherits a breaking change because the MinIO gateway mode was removed.

• Updated sizing plans
  We updated our sizing plans to make them reflect better how we recommend running Mimir and GEM in production. Note that this includes a breaking change for users of the "small" plan, more details can be found in the Helm changelog.

• Various quality of life improvements

  • Rollout strategies without downtime
  • Read path and compactor configuration refresh, providing better default settings
  • OTLP ingestion support in the Nginx configuration
  • A default configuration for alertmanager, so the user interface and the sending of alerts from the ruler works out of the box

Bug fixes

• Flusher: Added Overrides as a dependency to prevent panics when starting with -target=flusher. PR 3151
• Query-frontend: properly close gRPC streams to the query-scheduler to stop memory and goroutines leak. PR 3302
• Ruler: persist evaluation delay configured in the rulegroup. PR 3392
• Fix panics in OTLP ingest path when parse errors occur. PR 3538

Changelog

2.5.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Flag -azure.msi-resource is now ignored, and will be removed in Mimir 2.7. This setting is now made automatically by Azure. #2682
• [CHANGE] Experimental flag -blocks-storage.tsdb.out-of-order-capacity-min has been removed. #3261
• [CHANGE] Distributor: Wrap errors from pushing to ingesters with useful context, for example clarifying timeouts. #3307
• [CHANGE] The default value of -server.http-write-timeout has changed from 30s to 2m. #3346
• [CHANGE] Reduce period of health checks in connection pools for querier->store-gateway, ruler->ruler, and alertmanager->alertmanager clients to 10s. This reduces the time to fail a gRPC call when the remote stops responding. #3168
• [CHANGE] Hide TSDB block ranges period config from doc and mark it experimental. #3518
• [FEATURE] Alertmanager: added Discord support. #3309
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added -server.tls-min-version and -server.tls-cipher-suites flags to configure cipher suites and min TLS version supported by HTTP and gRPC servers. #2898
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Add age filter to forwarding functionality, to not forward samples which are older than defined duration. If such samples are not ingested, cortex_discarded_samples_total{reason="forwarded-sample-too-old"} is increased. #3049 #3113
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: Reduce memory allocation when generating ids in index cache. #3179
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: truncate queries based on the configured creation grace period (--validation.create-grace-period) to avoid querying too far into the future. #3172
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ingester: Reduce activity tracker memory allocation. #3203
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: Log more detailed information in the case of a failed query. #3190
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added -usage-stats.installation-mode configuration to track the installation mode via the anonymous usage statistics. #3244
• [ENHANCEMENT] Compactor: Add new cortex_compactor_block_max_time_delta_seconds histogram for detecting if compaction of blocks is lagging behind. #3240 #3429
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ingester: reduced the memory footprint of active series custom trackers. #2568
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Include X-Scope-OrgId header in requests forwarded to configured forwarding endpoint. #3283 #3385
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alertmanager: reduced memory utilization in Mimir clusters with a large number of tenants. #3309
• [ENHANCEMENT] Add experimental flag -shutdown-delay to allow components to wait after receiving SIGTERM and before stopping. In this time the component returns 503 from /ready endpoint. #3298
• [ENHANCEMENT] Go: update to go 1.19.3. #3371
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alerts: added RulerRemoteEvaluationFailing alert, firing when communication between ruler and frontend fails in remote operational mode. #3177 #3389
• [ENHANCEMENT] Clarify which S3 signature versions are supported in the error "unsupported signature version". #3376
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: improved index header reading performance. #3393 #3397 #3436
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: improved performance of series matching. #3391
• [ENHANCEMENT] Move the validation of incoming series before the distributor's forwarding functionality, so that we don't forward invalid series. #3386 #3458
• [ENHANCEMENT] S3 bucket configuration now validates that the endpoint does not have the bucket name prefix. #3414
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: added "fetched index bytes" to query statistics, so that the statistics contain the total bytes read by store-gateways from TSDB block indexes. #3206
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: push wrapper should only receive unforwarded samples. #2980
• [BUGFIX] Flusher: Add Overrides as a dependency to prevent panics when starting with -target=flusher. #3151
• [BUGFIX] Updated golang.org/x/text dependency to fix CVE-2022-32149. #3285
• [BUGFIX] Query-frontend: properly close gRPC streams to the query-scheduler to stop memory and goroutines leak. #3302
• [BUGFIX] Ruler: persist evaluation delay configured in the rulegroup. #3392
• [BUGFIX] Ring status pages: show 100% ownership as "100%", not "1e+02%". #3435
• [BUGFIX] Fix panics in OTLP ingest path when parse errors exist. #3538

Mixin

• [CHANGE] Alerts: Change MimirSchedulerQueriesStuck for time to 7 minutes to account for the time it takes for HPA to scale up. #3223
• [CHANGE] Dashboards: Removed the Querier > Stages panel from the Mimir / Queries dashboard. #3311
• [CHANGE] Configuration: The format of the autoscaling section of the configuration has changed to support more components. #3378
  • Instead of specific config variables for each component, they are listed in a dictionary. For example, autoscaling.querier_enabled becomes autoscaling.querier.enabled.
• [FEATURE] Dashboards: Added "Mimir / Overview resources" dashboard, providing an high level view over a Mimir cluster resources utilization. #3481
• [FEATURE] Dashboards: Added "Mimir / Overview networking" dashboard, providing an high level view over a Mimir cluster network bandwidth, inflight requests and TCP connections. #3487
• [FEATURE] Compile baremetal mixin along k8s mixin. #3162 #3514
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alerts: Add MimirRingMembersMismatch firing when a component does not have the expected number of running jobs. #2404
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Add optional row about the Distributor's metric forwarding feature ...

2.5.0-rc.0

This release contains 227 PRs from 43 authors, including new contributors Aldo D'Aquino, Anıl Mısırlıoğlu, Charles Korn, Danny Staple, Dylan Crees, Eduardo Silvi, FG, Jesse Weaver, KarlisAG, Leegin-darknight, Rohan Kumar, Wille Faler, Y.Horie, manohar-koukuntla, paulroche, songjiayang, Éamon Ryan. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.5.0-rc.0 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.5.0-rc.0 of Grafana Mimir.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Features and enhancements

• Alertmanager Discord support
  Alertmanager can now be configured to send alerts in Discord channels.

• Configurable TLS minimum version and cipher suites
  We added the flags -server.tls-min-version and -server.tls-cipher-suites that can be used to define the minimum TLS version and the supported cipher suites in all HTTP and gRPC servers in Mimir.

• Lower memory usage in store-gateway, ingester and alertmanager
  We made various changes related to how index lookups are performed and how the active series custom trackers are implemented, which results in better performance and lower overall memory usage in the store-gateway and ingester.
  We also optimized the alertmanager, which results in a 50% reduction in memory usage in use cases with larger numbers of tenants.

• Improved Mimir dashboards
  We added two new dashboards named Mimir / Overview resources and Mimir / Overview networking. Furthermore, we have made various improvements to the following existing dashboards:

  • Mimir / Overview: Add "remote read", "metadata", and "exemplar" queries.
  • Mimir / Writes: Add optional row about the distributor's new forwarding feature.
  • Mimir / Tenants: Add insights into the read path.

Helm chart improvements

• Zone aware replication
  Helm now supports deploying the ingesters and store-gateways as different availability zones. The replication is also zone-aware, therefore multiple instances of one zone can fail without any service interruption and roll outs can be performed faster because many instances of each zone can be restarted together, as opposed to them all restarting in sequence.

  This is a breaking change, for details on how to upgrade please review the Helm changelog.

• Running without root privileges
  All Mimir, GEM and Agent processes now don't require root privileges to run anymore.

• Unified reverse proxy (gateway) configuration for Mimir and GEM
  This change allows for an easier upgrade path from Mimir to GEM, without any downtime. The unified configuration also makes it possible to autoscale the GEM gateway pods and it supports OpenShift Route. The change also deprecates the nginx section in the configuration. The section will be removed in release 7.0.0.

• Updated MinIO
  The MinIO sub-chart was updated from 4.x to 5.0.0, note that this update inherits a breaking change because the MinIO gateway mode was removed.

• Updated sizing plans
  We updated our sizing plans to make them reflect better how we recommend running Mimir and GEM in production. Note that this includes a breaking change for users of the "small" plan, more details can be found in the Helm changelog.

• Various quality of life improvements

  • Rollout strategies without downtime
  • Read path and compactor configuration refresh, providing better default settings
  • OTLP ingestion support in the Nginx configuration
  • A default configuration for alertmanager, so the user interface and the sending of alerts from the ruler works out of the box

Bug fixes

• Flusher: Added Overrides as a dependency to prevent panics when starting with -target=flusher. PR 3151
• Query-frontend: properly close gRPC streams to the query-scheduler to stop memory and goroutines leak. PR 3302
• Ruler: persist evaluation delay configured in the rulegroup. PR 3392
• Fix panics in OTLP ingest path when parse errors occur. PR 3538

Changelog

2.5.0-rc.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Flag -azure.msi-resource is now ignored, and will be removed in Mimir 2.7. This setting is now made automatically by Azure. #2682
• [CHANGE] Experimental flag -blocks-storage.tsdb.out-of-order-capacity-min has been removed. #3261
• [CHANGE] Distributor: Wrap errors from pushing to ingesters with useful context, for example clarifying timeouts. #3307
• [CHANGE] The default value of -server.http-write-timeout has changed from 30s to 2m. #3346
• [CHANGE] Reduce period of health checks in connection pools for querier->store-gateway, ruler->ruler, and alertmanager->alertmanager clients to 10s. This reduces the time to fail a gRPC call when the remote stops responding. #3168
• [CHANGE] Hide TSDB block ranges period config from doc and mark it experimental. #3518
• [FEATURE] Alertmanager: added Discord support. #3309
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added -server.tls-min-version and -server.tls-cipher-suites flags to configure cipher suites and min TLS version supported by HTTP and gRPC servers. #2898
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Add age filter to forwarding functionality, to not forward samples which are older than defined duration. If such samples are not ingested, cortex_discarded_samples_total{reason="forwarded-sample-too-old"} is increased. #3049 #3113
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: Reduce memory allocation when generating ids in index cache. #3179
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: truncate queries based on the configured creation grace period (--validation.create-grace-period) to avoid querying too far into the future. #3172
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ingester: Reduce activity tracker memory allocation. #3203
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: Log more detailed information in the case of a failed query. #3190
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added -usage-stats.installation-mode configuration to track the installation mode via the anonymous usage statistics. #3244
• [ENHANCEMENT] Compactor: Add new cortex_compactor_block_max_time_delta_seconds histogram for detecting if compaction of blocks is lagging behind. #3240 #3429
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ingester: reduced the memory footprint of active series custom trackers. #2568
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Include X-Scope-OrgId header in requests forwarded to configured forwarding endpoint. #3283 #3385
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alertmanager: reduced memory utilization in Mimir clusters with a large number of tenants. #3309
• [ENHANCEMENT] Add experimental flag -shutdown-delay to allow components to wait after receiving SIGTERM and before stopping. In this time the component returns 503 from /ready endpoint. #3298
• [ENHANCEMENT] Go: update to go 1.19.3. #3371
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alerts: added RulerRemoteEvaluationFailing alert, firing when communication between ruler and frontend fails in remote operational mode. #3177 #3389
• [ENHANCEMENT] Clarify which S3 signature versions are supported in the error "unsupported signature version". #3376
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: improved index header reading performance. #3393 #3397 #3436
• [ENHANCEMENT] Store-gateway: improved performance of series matching. #3391
• [ENHANCEMENT] Move the validation of incoming series before the distributor's forwarding functionality, so that we don't forward invalid series. #3386 #3458
• [ENHANCEMENT] S3 bucket configuration now validates that the endpoint does not have the bucket name prefix. #3414
• [ENHANCEMENT] Query-frontend: added "fetched index bytes" to query statistics, so that the statistics contain the total bytes read by store-gateways from TSDB block indexes. #3206
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: push wrapper should only receive unforwarded samples. #2980
• [BUGFIX] Flusher: Add Overrides as a dependency to prevent panics when starting with -target=flusher. #3151
• [BUGFIX] Updated golang.org/x/text dependency to fix CVE-2022-32149. #3285
• [BUGFIX] Query-frontend: properly close gRPC streams to the query-scheduler to stop memory and goroutines leak. #3302
• [BUGFIX] Ruler: persist evaluation delay configured in the rulegroup. #3392
• [BUGFIX] Ring status pages: show 100% ownership as "100%", not "1e+02%". #3435
• [BUGFIX] Fix panics in OTLP ingest path when parse errors exist. #3538

Mixin

• [CHANGE] Alerts: Change MimirSchedulerQueriesStuck for time to 7 minutes to account for the time it takes for HPA to scale up. #3223
• [CHANGE] Dashboards: Removed the Querier > Stages panel from the Mimir / Queries dashboard. #3311
• [CHANGE] Configuration: The format of the autoscaling section of the configuration has changed to support more components. #3378
  • Instead of specific config variables for each component, they are listed in a dictionary. For example, autoscaling.querier_enabled becomes autoscaling.querier.enabled.
• [FEATURE] Dashboards: Added "Mimir / Overview resources" dashboard, providing an high level view over a Mimir cluster resources utilization. #3481
• [FEATURE] Dashboards: Added "Mimir / Overview networking" dashboard, providing an high level view over a Mimir cluster network bandwidth, inflight requests and TCP connections. #3487
• [FEATURE] Compile baremetal mixin along k8s mixin. #3162 #3514
• [ENHANCEMENT] Alerts: Add MimirRingMembersMismatch firing when a component does not have the expected number of running jobs. #2404
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Add optional row about the Distributor's metric ...

2.4.0

This release contains 190 PRs from 29 authors, including new contributors Fayzal Ghantiwala, Furkan Türkal, Joe Blubaugh, Justin Lei, Nicolas DUPEUX, Paul Puschmann, Radu Domnu, Shubham Ranjan. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.4.0 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.4 of Grafana Mimir.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Note: If you are upgrading from Grafana Mimir 2.3, review the list of important changes that follow.

Features and enhancements

• Query-scheduler ring-based service discovery:
  The query-scheduler is an optional, stateless component that retains a queue of queries to execute, and distributes the workload to available queriers. The use the query-scheduler, query-frontends and queriers are required to discover the addresses of the query-scheduler instances.

  In addition to DNS-based service discovery, Mimir 2.4 introduces the ring-based service discovery for the query-scheduler. When enabled, the query-schedulers join their own hash ring (similar to other Mimir components), and the query-frontends and queriers discover query-scheduler instances via the ring.

  Ring-based service discovery makes it easier to set up the query-scheduler in environments where you can't easily define a DNS entry that resolves to the running query-scheduler instances. For more information, refer to query-scheduler configuration.

• New API endpoint exposes per-tenant limits:
  Mimir 2.4 introduces a new API endpoint, which is available on all Mimir components that load the runtime configuration. The endpoint exposes the limits of the authenticated tenant. You can use this new API endpoint when developing custom integrations with Mimir that require looking up the actual limits that are applied on a given tenant. For more information, refer to Get tenant limits.

• New TLS configuration options:
  Mimir 2.4 introduces new options to configure the accepted TLS cipher suites, and the minimum versions for the HTTP and gRPC clients that are used between Mimir components, or by Mimir to communicate to external services such as Consul or etcd.

  You can use these new configuration options to override the default TLS settings and meet your security policy requirements. For more information, refer to Securing Grafana Mimir communications with TLS.

• Maximum range query length limit:
  Mimir 2.4 introduces the new configuration option -query-frontend.max-total-query-length to limit the maximum range query length, which is computed as the query's end minus start timestamp. This limit is enforced in the query-frontend and defaults to -store.max-query-length if unset.

  The new configuration option allows you to set different limits between the received query maximum length (-query-frontend.max-total-query-length) and the maximum length of partial queries after splitting and sharding (-store.max-query-length).

The following experimental features have been promoted to stable:

• Ruler's remote evaluation mode
• Memberlist cluster label verification

Helm chart improvements

The mimir-distributed Helm chart is the best way to install Mimir on Kubernetes. As part of the Mimir 2.4 release, we’re also releasing version 3.2 of the mimir-distributed Helm chart.

Notable enhancements follow. For the full list of changes, see the Helm chart changelog.

• Added support for topologySpreadContraints.
• Replaced the default anti-affinity rules with topologySpreadContraints for all components which puts less restrictions on where Kubernetes can run pods.
• Important: if you are not using the sizing plans (small.yaml, large.yaml, capped-small.yaml, capped-large.yaml) in production, you must reintroduce pod affinity rules for the ingester and store-gateway. This also fixes a missing label selector for the ingester.
  Merge the following with your custom values file:

  ingester:
    affinity:
      podAntiAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: target
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - ingester
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app.kubernetes.io/component
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - ingester
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
  store_gateway:
    affinity:
      podAntiAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: target
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - store-gateway
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app.kubernetes.io/component
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - store-gateway
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"

• Updated the anti affinity rules in the sizing plans (small.yaml, large.yaml, capped-small.yaml, capped-large.yaml). The sizing plans now enforce that no two pods of the ingester, store-gateway, or alertmanager StatefulSets are scheduled on the same Node. Pods from different StaatefulSets can share a Node.
• Support for Openshift Route resource for nginx has been added.

Important changes

In Grafana Mimir 2.4, the default values of the following configuration options have changed:

• -distributor.remote-timeout has changed from 20s to 2s.
• -distributor.forwarding.request-timeout has changed from 10s to 2s.
• -blocks-storage.tsdb.head-compaction-concurrency has changed from 5 to 1.
• The hash-ring heartbeat period for distributors, ingesters, rulers, and compactors has increased from 5s to 15s.

In Grafana Mimir 2.4, the following deprecated configuration options have been removed:

• The YAML configuration option limits.active_series_custom_trackers_config.
• The CLI flag -ingester.ring.join-after and its respective YAML configuration option ingester.ring.join_after.
• The CLI flag -querier.shuffle-sharding-ingesters-lookback-period and its respective YAML configuration option querier.shuffle_sharding_ingesters_lookback_period.

With Grafana Mimir 2.4, the anonymous usage statistics tracking is enabled by default.
Mimir maintainers use this anonymous information to learn more about how the open source community runs Mimir and what the Mimir team should focus on when working on the next features and documentation improvements.
If possible, we ask you to keep the usage reporting feature enabled.
In case you want to opt-out from anonymous usage statistics reporting, refer to Disable the anonymous usage statistics reporting.

Bug fixes

• PR 2979: Fix remote write HTTP response status code returned by Mimir when failing to write only to one ingester (the quorum is still honored when running Mimir with the default replication factor of 3) and some series are not ingested because of validation errors or some limits being reached.
• PR 3005: Fix the querier to re-balance its workers connections when a query-frontend or query-scheduler instance is terminated.
• PR 2963: Fix the remote read endpoint to correctly support the Accept-Encoding: snappy HTTP request header.

Changelog

2.4.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Distributor: change the default value of -distributor.remote-timeout to 2s from 20s and -distributor.forwarding.request-timeout to 2s from 10s to improve distributor resource usage when ingesters crash. #2728 #2912
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking: added the -ingester.ring.store value. #2981
• [CHANGE] Series metadata HELP that is longer than -validation.max-metadata-length is now truncated silently, instead of being dropped with a 400 status code. #2993
• [CHANGE] Ingester: changed default setting for -ingester.ring.readiness-check-ring-health from true to false. #2953
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking has been enabled by default, to help Mimir maintainers make better decisions to support the open source community. #2939 #3034
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking: added the minimum and maximum value of -ingester.out-of-order-time-window. #2940
• [CHANGE] The default hash ring heartbeat period for distributors, ingesters, rulers an...

2.4.0-rc.1

This release contains 8 PRs from 2 authors. Thank you!

Changelog

2.4.0-rc.1

Grafana Mimir

• [BUGFIX] Fix distributor from returning a 500 status code when a 400 was received from the ingester. #3211
• [BUGFIX] Fix incorrect OS value set in Mimir v2.3.* RPM packages. #3221

All changes in this release: mimir-2.4.0-rc.0...mimir-2.4.0-rc.1

2.4.0-rc.0

This release contains 166 PRs from 29 authors. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.4.0-rc.0 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.4 of Grafana Mimir.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Note: If you are upgrading from Grafana Mimir 2.3, review the list of important changes that follow.

Features and enhancements

• Query-scheduler ring-based service discovery: The query-scheduler is an optional, stateless component that retains a queue of queries to execute, and distributes the workload to available queriers. The use the query-scheduler, query-frontends and queriers are required to discover the addresses of the query-scheduler instances.

  In addition to DNS-based service discovery, Mimir 2.4 introduces the ring-based service discovery for the query-scheduler. When enabled, the query-schedulers join their own hash ring (similar to other Mimir components), and the query-frontends and queriers discover query-scheduler instances via the ring.

  Ring-based service discovery makes it easier to set up the query-scheduler in environments where you can’t easily define a DNS entry that resolves to the running query-scheduler instances. For more information, refer to query-scheduler configuration.

• New API endpoint exposes per-tenant limits: Mimir 2.4 introduces a new API endpoint, which is available on all Mimir components that load the runtime configuration. The endpoint exposes the limits of the authenticated tenant. You can use this new API endpoint when developing custom integrations with Mimir that require looking up the actual limits that are applied on a given tenant. For more information, refer to Get tenant limits.

  New TLS configuration options: Mimir 2.4 introduces new options to configure the accepted TLS cipher suites, and the minimum versions for the HTTP and gRPC clients that are used between Mimir components, or by Mimir to communicate to external services such as Consul or etcd.

  You can use these new configuration options to override the default TLS settings and meet your security policy requirements. For more information, refer to Securing Grafana Mimir communications with TLS.

• Maximum range query length limit: Mimir 2.4 introduces the new configuration option -query-frontend.max-total-query-length to limit the maximum range query length, which is computed as the query’s end minus start timestamp. This limit is enforced in the query-frontend and defaults to -store.max-query-length if unset.

  The new configuration option allows you to set different limits between the received query maximum length (-query-frontend.max-total-query-length) and the maximum length of partial queries after splitting and sharding (-store.max-query-length).

Helm chart improvements

The mimir-distributed Helm chart is the best way to install Mimir on Kubernetes. As part of the Mimir 2.4 release, we’re also releasing version 3.2 of the mimir-distributed Helm chart.

Notable enhancements follow. For the full list of changes, see the Helm chart changelog.

• Added support for topologySpreadContraints.

• Replaced the default anti-affinity rules with topologySpreadContraints for all components which puts less restrictions on where Kubernetes can run pods.

• Important: if you are not using the sizing plans (small.yaml, large.yaml, capped-small.yaml, capped-large.yaml) in production, you must reintroduce pod affinity rules for the ingester and store-gateway. This also fixes a missing label selector for the ingester. Merge the following with your custom values file:

  ingester:
    affinity:
      podAntiAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: target
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - ingester
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app.kubernetes.io/component
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - ingester
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
  store_gateway:
    affinity:
      podAntiAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: target
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - store-gateway
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app.kubernetes.io/component
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - store-gateway
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"

• Updated the anti affinity rules in the sizing plans (small.yaml, large.yaml, capped-small.yaml, capped-large.yaml). The sizing plans now enforce that no two pods of the ingester, store-gateway, or alertmanager StatefulSets are scheduled on the same Node. Pods from different StaatefulSets can share a Node.

• Support for Openshift Route resource for nginx has been added.

Important changes

In Grafana Mimir 2.4, the default values of the following configuration options have changed:

• -distributor.remote-timeout has changed from 20s to 2s.
• -distributor.forwarding.request-timeout has changed from 10s to 2s.
• -blocks-storage.tsdb.head-compaction-concurrency has changed from 5 to 1.
• The hash-ring heartbeat period for distributors, ingesters, rulers, and compactors has increased from 5s to 15s.

With Grafana Mimir 2.4, the anonymous usage statistics tracking is enabled by default. Mimir maintainers use this anonymous information to learn more about how the open source community runs Mimir and what the Mimir team should focus on when working on the next features and documentation improvements. If possible, we ask you to keep the usage reporting feature enabled. In case you want to opt-out from anonymous usage statistics reporting, refer to Disable the anonymous usage statistics reporting.

Bug fixes

• PR 2979: Fix remote write HTTP response status code returned by Mimir when failing to write only to one ingester (the quorum is still honored when running Mimir with the default replication factor of 3) and some series are not ingested because of validation errors or some limits being reached.
• PR 3005: Fix the querier to re-balance its workers connections when a query-frontend or query-scheduler instance is terminated.
• PR 2963: Fix the remote read endpoint to correctly support the Accept-Encoding: snappy HTTP request header.

Changelog

2.4.0-rc.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Distributor: change the default value of -distributor.remote-timeout to 2s from 20s and -distributor.forwarding.request-timeout to 2s from 10s to improve distributor resource usage when ingesters crash. #2728 #2912
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking: added the -ingester.ring.store value. #2981
• [CHANGE] Series metadata HELP that is longer than -validation.max-metadata-length is now truncated silently, instead of being dropped with a 400 status code. #2993
• [CHANGE] Ingester: changed default setting for -ingester.ring.readiness-check-ring-health from true to false. #2953
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking has been enabled by default, to help Mimir maintainers make better decisions to support the open source community. #2939 #3034
• [CHANGE] Anonymous usage statistics tracking: added the minimum and maximum value of -ingester.out-of-order-time-window. #2940
• [CHANGE] The default hash ring heartbeat period for distributors, ingesters, rulers and compactors has been increased from 5s to 15s. Now the default heartbeat period for all Mimir hash rings is 15s. #3033
• [CHANGE] Reduce the default TSDB head compaction concurrency (-blocks-storage.tsdb.head-compaction-concurrency) from 5 to 1, in order to reduce CPU spikes. #3093
• [CHANGE] Ruler: the ruler's remote evaluation mode (-ruler.query-frontend.address) is now stable. #3109
• [CHANGE] Limits: removed the deprecated YAML configuration option active_series_custom_trackers_config. Please use active_series_custom_trackers instead. #3110
• [CHANGE] Ingester: removed the deprecated configuration option -ingester.ring.join-after. #3111
• [CHANGE] Querier: removed the deprecated configuration option -querier.shuffle-sharding-ingesters-lookback-period. The value of `-querier.query...

mimir-2.3.1

This release contains 5 PRs from 1 author. Thank you!

2.3.1

Grafana Mimir

• [BUGFIX] Query-frontend: query sharding took exponential time to map binary expressions. #3027
• [BUGFIX] Distributor: Stop panics on OTLP endpoint when a single metric has multiple timeseries. #3040

Full Changelog: mimir-2.3.0...mimir-2.3.1

mimir-2.3.0

Grafana Mimir version 2.3 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.3 of Grafana Mimir, the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. For the complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Note: If you are upgrading from Grafana Mimir 2.2, review the list of important changes that follow.

This release contains 370 PRs from 39 authors. Thank you!

Features and enhancements

• Ingest metrics in OpenTelemetry format:
  This release of Grafana Mimir introduces experimental support for ingesting metrics from the OpenTelemetry Collector's otlphttp exporter. This adds a second ingestion option for users of the OTel Collector; Mimir was already compatible with the prometheusremotewrite exporter. For more information, please see Configure OTel Collector.

• Tenant federation for metadata queries:
  Users with tenant federation enabled could already issue instant queries, range queries, and exemplar queries to multiple tenants at once and receive a single aggregated result. With Grafana Mimir 2.3, we've added tenant federation support to the /api/v1/metadata endpoint as well.

• Simpler object storage configuration:
  Users can now configure block, alertmanager, and ruler storage all at once with the common YAML config option key (or -common.storage.* CLI flags). By centralizing your object storage configuration in one place, this enhancement makes configuration faster and less error prone. Users may still individually configure storage for each of these components if they desire. For more information, see the Common Configurations.

• .deb and .rpm packages for Mimir:
  Starting with version 2.3, we're publishing .deb and .rpm files for Grafana Mimir, which will make installing and running it on Debian or RedHat-based linux systems much easier. Thank you to community contributor wilfriedroset for your work to implement this!

• Import historic data:
  Users can now backfill time series data from their existing Prometheus or Cortex installation into Mimir using mimirtool, making it possible to migrate to Grafana Mimir without losing your existing metrics data. This support is still considered experimental and does not yet work for data stored in Thanos. To learn more about this feature, please see mimirtool backfill and Configure TSDB block upload

• Increased instant query performance:
  Grafana Mimir now supports splitting instant queries by time. This allows it to better parallelize execution of instant queries and therefore return results faster. At present, splitting is only supported for a subset of instant queries, which means not all instant queries will see a speedup. This feature is currently experimental and is disabled by default. It can be enabled with the split_instant_queries_by_interval YAML config option in the limits section (or the CLI flag -query-frontend.split-instant-queries-by-interval).

Helm chart improvements

The Mimir Helm chart is the best way to install Mimir on Kubernetes. As part of the Mimir 2.3 release, we’re also releasing version 3.1 of the Mimir Helm chart.

Notable enhancements follow. For the full list of changes, see the Helm chart changelog.

• We've upgraded the MinIO subchart dependency from a deprecated chart to the supported one. This creates a breaking change in how the administrator password is set. However, as the built-in MinIO is not a recommended object store for production use cases, this change did not warrant a new major version of the Mimir Helm chart.
• Query sharding is now enabled by default which should give you better performance on high cardinality metrics queries.
  • To compensate for the increased number of queries generated by query sharding, the query scheduler component is now enabled by default.
• The backfill API endpoints for importing historic time series data are now exposed on the Nginx gateway.
• Nginx now sets the value of the X-Scope-OrgID header equal to the value of Mimir's no_auth_tenant parameter by default. The previous release had set the value of X-Scope-OrgID to anonymous by default which complicated the process of migrating to Mimir.
• Memberlist now uses DNS service-discovery by default, which decreases startup time for large Mimir clusters.

Important changes

In Grafana Mimir 2.3 we have removed the following previously deprecated configuration options:

• The extend_writes parameter in the distributor YAML configuration and -distributor.extend-writes CLI flag have been removed.
• The active_series_custom_trackers parameter has been removed from the YAML configuration. It had already been moved to the runtime configuration. See #1188 for details.
• The blocks-storage.tsdb.isolation-enabled parameter in the YAML configuration and -blocks-storage.tsdb.isolation-enabled CLI flag have been removed.

With Grafana Mimir 2.3 we have also updated the default value for the CLI flag -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters to 100 to provide Denial-of-Service protection. Previously -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters was unlimited by default which could allow a tenant with HA Dedupe enabled to overload the HA tracker with __cluster__ label values that could cause the HA Dedupe database to fail.

Also, as noted above, the administrator password for Helm chart deployments using the built-in MinIO is now set differently.

Bug fixes

• PR 2447: Fix incorrect mapping of http status codes 429 to 500 when the request queue is full in the query-frontend. This corrects behavior in the query-frontend where a retryable 429 "Too Many Outstanding Requests" error from a querier was incorrectly returned as an unretryable 500 system error.
• PR 2505: The Memberlist key-value (KV) store now tries to "fast-join" the cluster to avoid serving an empty KV store. This fix addresses the confusing "empty ring" error response and the error log message "ring doesn't exist in KV store yet" emitted by services when there are other members present in the ring when a service starts. Those using other key-value store options (e.g., consul, etcd) are not impacted by this bug.
• PR 2289: The "List Prometheus rules" API endpoint of the Mimir Ruler component is no longer blocked while rules are being synced. This means users can now list rules while syncing larger rule sets.

Changelog

2.3.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Ingester: Added user label to ingester metric cortex_ingester_tsdb_out_of_order_samples_appended_total. On multitenant clusters this helps us find the rate of appended out-of-order samples for a specific tenant. #2493
• [CHANGE] Compactor: delete source and output blocks from local disk on compaction failed, to reduce likelihood that subsequent compactions fail because of no space left on disk. #2261
• [CHANGE] Ruler: Remove unused CLI flags -ruler.search-pending-for and -ruler.flush-period (and their respective YAML config options). #2288
• [CHANGE] Successful gRPC requests are no longer logged (only affects internal API calls). #2309
• [CHANGE] Add new -*.consul.cas-retry-delay flags. They have a default value of 1s, while previously there was no delay between retries. #2309
• [CHANGE] Store-gateway: Remove the experimental ability to run requests in a dedicated OS thread pool and associated CLI flag -store-gateway.thread-pool-size. #2423
• [CHANGE] Memberlist: disabled TCP-based ping fallback, because Mimir already uses a custom transport based on TCP. #2456
• [CHANGE] Change default value for -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters to 100 to provide a DoS protection. #2465
• [CHANGE] Experimental block upload API exposed by compactor has changed: Previous /api/v1/upload/block/{block} endpoint for starting block upload is now /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/start, and previous endpoint /api/v1/upload/block/{block}?uploadComplete=true for finishing block upload is now /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/finish. New API endpoint has been added: /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/check. #2486 #2548
• [CHANGE] Compactor: changed -compactor.max-compaction-time default from 0s (disabled) to 1h. When compacting blocks for a tenant, the compactor will move to compact blocks of another tenant or re-plan blocks to compact at least every 1h. #2514...

mimir-2.3.0-rc.2

Changes since 2.3.0-rc.0

This release contains 33 contributions from 9 authors. Thank you!

Note: We tagged a 2.3.0-rc.1 but found a panic in the alertmanager before publishing the 2.3.0-rc.1 pre-release. With 2.3.0-rc.2 we have included the fix for the alertmanager and created a new tag and release candidate.

---

2.3.0-rc.2

Grafana Mimir

• [BUGFIX] Alertmanager: revert upstream alertmananger to v0.24.0 to fix panic when unmarshalling email headers #2924 #2925

2.3.0-rc.1

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Distributor: if forwarding rules are used to forward samples, exemplars are now removed from the request #2725
• [CHANGE] Ingester: experimental -blocks-storage.tsdb.new-chunk-disk-mapper has been removed, new chunk disk mapper is now always used, and is no longer marked experimental. Default value of -blocks-storage.tsdb.head-chunks-write-queue-size has changed to 1000000, this enables async chunk queue by default, which leads to improved latency on the write path when new chunks are created in ingesters. #2762
• [CHANGE] Ingester: removed deprecated -blocks-storage.tsdb.isolation-enabled option. TSDB-level isolation is now always disabled in Mimir. #2782
• [CHANGE] Compactor: -compactor.partial-block-deletion-delay must either be set to 0 (to disable partial blocks deletion) or a value higher than 4h. #2787
• [CHANGE] Query-frontend: CLI flag -query-frontend.align-querier-with-step has been deprecated. Please use -query-frontend.align-queries-with-step instead. #2840
• [CHANGE] Distributor: change the default value of -distributor.remote-timeout to 2s from 20s and -distributor.forwarding.request-timeout to 2s from 10s to improve distributor resource usage when ingesters crash. #2728
• [FEATURE] Introduced an experimental anonymous usage statistics tracking (disabled by default), to help Mimir maintainers make better decisions to support the open source community. The tracking system anonymously collects non-sensitive, non-personally identifiable information about the running Mimir cluster, and is disabled by default. #2643 #2662 #2685 #2732 #2733 #2735
• [FEATURE] Introduced an experimental deployment mode called read-write and running a fully featured Mimir cluster with three components: write, read and backend. The read-write deployment mode is a trade-off between the monolithic mode (only one component, no isolation) and the microservices mode (many components, high isolation). #2754 #2838
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Add cortex_distributor_query_ingester_chunks_deduped_total and cortex_distributor_query_ingester_chunks_total metrics for determining how effective ingester chunk deduplication at query time is. #2713
• [ENHANCEMENT] Upgrade Docker base images to alpine:3.16.2. #2729
• [ENHANCEMENT] Ruler: Add <prometheus-http-prefix>/api/v1/status/buildinfo endpoint. #2724
• [ENHANCEMENT] Querier: Ensure all queries pulled from query-frontend or query-scheduler are immediately executed. The maximum workers concurrency in each querier is configured by -querier.max-concurrent. #2598
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Add cortex_distributor_received_requests_total and cortex_distributor_requests_in_total metrics to provide visiblity into appropriate per-tenant request limits. #2770
• [ENHANCEMENT] Distributor: Add single forwarding remote-write endpoint for a tenant (forwarding_endpoint), instead of using per-rule endpoints. This takes precendence over per-rule endpoints. #2801
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added err-mimir-distributor-max-write-message-size to the errors catalog. #2470
• [ENHANCEMENT] Add sanity check at startup to ensure the configured filesystem directories don't overlap for different components. #2828
• [ENHANCEMENT] Go: updated to go 1.19.1. #2637
• [BUGFIX] Ruler: fix not restoring alerts' state at startup. #2648
• [BUGFIX] Ingester: Fix disk filling up after restarting ingesters with out-of-order support disabled while it was enabled before. #2799
• [BUGFIX] Memberlist: retry joining memberlist cluster on startup when no nodes are resolved. #2837
• [BUGFIX] Query-frontend: fix incorrect mapping of http status codes 413 to 500 when request is too large. #2819
• [BUGFIX] Ruler: fix panic when ruler.external_url is explicitly set to an empty string ("") in YAML. #2915

Mixin

• [CHANGE] Dashboards: remove the "Cache - Latency (old)" panel from the "Mimir / Queries" dashboard. #2796
• [FEATURE] Dashboards: added support to experimental read-write deployment mode. #2780
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Updated the Writes dashboard to account for samples ingested via the new OTLP ingestion endpoint. #2919
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: added support to query-tee in front of ruler-query-frontend in the "Remote ruler reads" dashboard. #2761
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Introduce support for baremetal deployment, setting deployment_type: 'baremetal' in the mixin _config. #2657
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: use timeseries panel to show exemplars. #2800
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Include per-tenant request rate in "Tenants" dashboard. #2874
• [ENHANCEMENT] Dashboards: Include inflight object store requests in "Reads" dashboard. #2914
• [BUGFIX] Dashboards: stop setting 'interval' in dashboards; it should be set on your datasource. #2802

Jsonnet

• [ENHANCEMENT] Upgrade memcached image tag to memcached:1.6.16-alpine. #2740
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added $._config.configmaps and $._config.runtime_config_files to make it easy to add new configmaps or runtime config file to all components. #2748

Mimirtool

• [BUGFIX] Version checking no longer prompts for updating when already on latest version. #2723

Query-tee

• [CHANGE] Renamed CLI flag -server.service-port to -server.http-service-port. #2683
• [CHANGE] Renamed metric cortex_querytee_request_duration_seconds to cortex_querytee_backend_request_duration_seconds. Metric cortex_querytee_request_duration_seconds is now reported without label backend. #2683
• [ENHANCEMENT] Added HTTP over gRPC support to query-tee to allow testing gRPC requests to Mimir instances. #2683

Mimir Continuous Test

• [ENHANCEMENT] Added basic authentication and bearer token support for when Mimir is behind a gateway authenticating the calls. #2717

Documentation

Full Changelog: mimir-2.3.0-rc0...mimir-2.3.0-rc.2

mimir-2.3.0-rc0

This release contains 333 PRs from 39 authors. Thank you!

Grafana Mimir version 2.3 release notes

Grafana Labs is excited to announce version 2.3 of Grafana Mimir, the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world.

The highlights that follow include the top features, enhancements, and bugfixes in this release. If you are upgrading from Grafana Mimir 2.2, there is upgrade-related information as well.
For the complete list of changes, see the Changelog.

Features and enhancements

• Ingest metrics in OpenTelemetry format:
  This release of Grafana Mimir introduces experimental support for ingesting metrics from the OpenTelemetry Collector's otlphttp exporter. This adds a second ingestion option for users of the OTel Collector; Mimir was already compatible with the prometheusremotewrite exporter. For more information, please see Configure OTel Collector.

• Increased instant query performance:
  Grafana Mimir now supports splitting instant queries by time. This allows it to better parallelize execution of instant queries and therefore return results faster. At present, splitting is only supported for a subset of instant queries, which means not all instant queries will see a speedup. This feature is being released as experimental and is disabled by default. It can be enabled by setting -query-frontend.split-instant-queries-by-interval.

• Tenant federation for metadata queries:
  Users with tenant federation enabled could previously issue instant queries, range queries, and exemplar queries to multiple tenants at once and receive a single aggregated result. With Grafana Mimir 2.3, we've added tenant federation support to the /api/v1/metadata endpoint as well.

• Simpler object storage configuration:
  Users can now configure block, alertmanager, and ruler storage all at once with the common YAML config option key (or -common.storage.* CLI flags). By centralizing your object storage configuration in one place, this enhancement makes configuration faster and less error prone. Users can still individually configure storage for each of these components if they desire. For more information, see the Common Configurations.

• DEB and RPM packages for Mimir:
  Starting with version 2.3, we're publishing deb and rpm files for Grafana Mimir, which will make installing and running it on Debian or RedHat-based linux systems much easier. Thank you to community contributor wilfriedroset for your work to implement this!

• Import historic data to Grafana Mimir:
  Users can now backfill time series data from their existing Prometheus or Cortex installation into Mimir using mimirtool, making it possible to migrate to Grafana Mimir without losing your existing metrics data. This support is still considered experimental and does not work for data stored in Thanos yet. To learn more about this feature, please see mimirtool backfill and Configure TSDB block upload

• New Helm chart minor release: The Mimir Helm chart is the best way to install Mimir on Kubernetes. As part of the Mimir 2.3 release, we’re also releasing version 3.1 of the Mimir Helm chart. Notable enhancements follow. For the full list of changes, see the Helm chart changelog.

  • We've upgraded the MinIO subchart dependency from a deprecated chart to the supported one. This creates a breaking change in how the administrator password is set. However, as the built-in MinIO is not a recommended object store for production use cases, this change did not warrant a new major version of the Mimir Helm chart.
  • The backfill API endpoints for importing historic time series data are now exposed on the Nginx gateway.
  • Nginx now sets the value of the X-Scope-OrgID header equal to the value of Mimir's no_auth_tenant parameter by default. The previous release had set the value of X-Scope-OrgID to anonymous by default which complicated the process of migrating to Mimir.
  • Memberlist now uses DNS service-discovery by default, which should decrease startup time for large Mimir clusters.

Upgrade considerations

In Grafana Mimir 2.3 we have removed the following previously deprecated configuration options:

• The extend_writes parameter in the distributor YAML configuration and -distributor.extend-writes CLI flag have been removed.
• The active_series_custom_trackers parameter has been removed from the YAML configuration. It had already been moved to the runtime configuration. See #1188 for details.

With Grafana Mimir 2.3 we have also updated the default value for -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters to 100 to provide Denial-of-Service protection. Previously -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters was unlimited by default which could allow a tenant with HA Dedupe enabled to overload the HA tracker with __cluster__ label values that could cause the HA Dedupe database to fail.

Bug fixes

• PR 2447: Fix incorrect mapping of http status codes 429 to 500 when the request queue is full in the query-frontend. This corrects behavior in the query-frontend where a 429 "Too Many Outstanding Requests" error (a retriable error) from a querier was incorrectly returned as a 500 system error (an unretriable error).
• PR 2505: The Memberlist key-value (KV) store now tries to "fast-join" the cluster to avoid serving an empty KV store. This fix addresses the confusing "empty ring" error response and the error log message "ring doesn't exist in KV store yet" emitted by services when there are other members present in the ring when a service starts. Those using other key-value store options (e.g., consul, etcd) are not impacted by this bug.
• PR 2289: The "List Prometheus rules" API endpoint of the Mimir Ruler component is no longer blocked while rules are being synced. This means users can now list rules while syncing larger rule sets.

Changelog since 2.2

2.3.0-rc.0

Grafana Mimir

• [CHANGE] Ingester: Added user label to ingester metric cortex_ingester_tsdb_out_of_order_samples_appended_total. On multitenant clusters this helps us find the rate of appended out-of-order samples for a specific tenant. #2493
• [CHANGE] Compactor: delete source and output blocks from local disk on compaction failed, to reduce likelihood that subsequent compactions fail because of no space left on disk. #2261
• [CHANGE] Ruler: Remove unused CLI flags -ruler.search-pending-for and -ruler.flush-period (and their respective YAML config options). #2288
• [CHANGE] Successful gRPC requests are no longer logged (only affects internal API calls). #2309
• [CHANGE] Add new -*.consul.cas-retry-delay flags. They have a default value of 1s, while previously there was no delay between retries. #2309
• [CHANGE] Store-gateway: Remove the experimental ability to run requests in a dedicated OS thread pool and associated CLI flag -store-gateway.thread-pool-size. #2423
• [CHANGE] Memberlist: disabled TCP-based ping fallback, because Mimir already uses a custom transport based on TCP. #2456
• [CHANGE] Change default value for -distributor.ha-tracker.max-clusters to 100 to provide a DoS protection. #2465
• [CHANGE] Experimental block upload API exposed by compactor has changed: Previous /api/v1/upload/block/{block} endpoint for starting block upload is now /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/start, and previous endpoint /api/v1/upload/block/{block}?uploadComplete=true for finishing block upload is now /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/finish. New API endpoint has been added: /api/v1/upload/block/{block}/check. #2486 #2548
• [CHANGE] Compactor: changed -compactor.max-compaction-time default from 0s (disabled) to 1h. When compacting blocks for a tenant, the compactor will move to compact blocks of another tenant or re-plan blocks to compact at least every 1h. #2514
• [CHANGE] Distributor: removed previously deprecated extend_writes (see #1856) YAML key and -distributor.extend-writes CLI flag from the distributor config. #2551
• [CHANGE] Ingester: removed previously deprecated active_series_custom_trackers (see #1188) YAML key from the ingester config. #2552
• [CHANGE] The tenant ID __mimir_cluster is reserved by Mimir and not allowed to store metrics. #2643
• [CHANGE] Purger: removed the purger component and moved its API endpoints /purger/delete_tenant and /purger/delete_tenant_status to the compactor at /compactor/delete_tenant and /compactor/delete_tenant_status. The new endpoints on the compactor are stable. #2644
• [CHANGE] Memberlist: Change the leave timeout duration (-memberlist.leave-timeout duration) from 5s to 20s and connection timeout (`-memberlist.pac...