[Prometheus][] is a monitoring system that is designed to process a
large number of metrics, centralize them on one (or multiple) servers
and serve them with a well-defined API. That API is queried through a
domain-specific language (DSL) called "PromQL" or "Prometheus Query
Language". Prometheus also supports basic graphing capabilities
although those are limited enough that we use a separate graphing
layer on top (see [howto/Grafana](howto/Grafana)).

[Prometheus]: https://prometheus.io/

[[_TOC_]]

# Tutorial

## Looking at pretty graphs

The Prometheus web interface is available at:

<https://prometheus.torproject.org>

A simple query you can try is to pick any metric in the list and click
`Execute`. For example, [this link][] will show the 5-minute load
over the last two weeks for the known servers.

[this link]: https://prometheus1.torproject.org/graph?g0.range_input=2w&g0.expr=node_load5&g0.tab=0

The Prometheus web interface is crude: it's better to use [howto/grafana](howto/grafana)
dashboards for most purposes other than debugging.

# How-to

## Adding metrics for users

If you want your service to be monitored by Prometheus, you need to
[write](https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/writing_exporters/) or [reuse an existing exporter](https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/). [Writing an
exporter][] is more involved, but still fairly easy and might be
necessary if you are the maintainer of an application not already
instrumented for Prometheus. 

[Writing an exporter]: https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/writing_exporters/

The [actual documentation][Writing an exporter] is fairly good, but basically: a
Prometheus exporter is a simple HTTP server which responds to a
specific URL (`/metrics`, by convention, but it can be anything) and
responds with a key/value list of entries, one on each line. Each
"key" is a simple string with an arbitrary list of "labels" enclosed
in curly braces. For example, here's how the "node exporter" exports
CPU usage:

    # HELP node_cpu_seconds_total Seconds the cpus spent in each mode.
    # TYPE node_cpu_seconds_total counter
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="idle"} 948736.11
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="iowait"} 1659.94
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="irq"} 0
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="nice"} 516.23
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="softirq"} 16491.47
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="steal"} 0
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="system"} 35893.84
    node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="user"} 67711.74

Obviously, you don't necessarily have to write all that logic
yourself, however: there are [client libraries](https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/) (see the [Golang
guide](https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/go-application/), [Python demo](https://github.com/prometheus/client_python#three-step-demo) or [C documentation](https://digitalocean.github.io/prometheus-client-c/) for examples) that
do most of the job for you.

In any case, you should be careful about the names and labels of the
metrics. See the [metric and label naming best practices](https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/naming/).

Once you have an exporter endpoint (say at
`http://example.com:9090/metrics`), make sure it works:

    curl http://example.com:9090/metrics

This should return a number of metrics that change (or not) at each
call.

From there on, provide that endpoint to the sysadmins (or someone with
access to the external monitoring server), which will follow the
procedure below to add the metric to Prometheus.

Once the exporter is hooked into Prometheus, you can browse the
metrics directly at: <https://prometheus.torproject.org>. Graphs
should be available at <https://grafana.torproject.org>, although
those need to be created and committed into git by sysadmins to
persist, see the [anarcat dashboard directory](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/grafana-dashboards) for more
information.

## Adding targets on the external server

Alerts and scrape targets on the external server are managed through a
Git repository called [prometheus-alerts](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts). To add a scrape target:

 1. clone the repository

        git clone https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/
        cd prometheus-alerts

 2. assuming you're adding a node exporter, to add the target:

        cat > targets.d/node_myproject.yaml <<EOF
        # scrape the external node exporters for project Foo
        ---
        - targets:
          - targetone.example.com
          - targettwo.example.com

 3. add, commit, and push:

        git checkout -b myproject
        git add targets.d
        git commit -m"add node exporter targets for my project"
        git push origin -u myproject

The last push command should show you the URL where you can submit
your merge request.

After being merged, the changes should propagate within [4 to 6
hours](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/puppet/#cron-and-scheduling).

See also the [targets.d documentation in the git repository](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/tree/main/targets.d).

## Adding targets on the internal server

Normally, services configured in Puppet SHOULD automatically be
scraped by Prometheus (see below). If, however, you need to manually
configure a service, you *may* define extra jobs in the
`$scrape_configs` array, in the
`profile::prometheus::server::internal` Puppet class.

For example, because the GitLab Prometheus setup is not managed by
Puppet ([tpo/tpa/gitlab#20](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/gitlab/-/issues/20)), we cannot use this automatic setup,
so manual scrape targets are defined like this:

      $scrape_configs =
      [
        {
          'job_name'       => 'gitaly',
          'static_configs' => [
            {
              'targets' => [
                'gitlab-02.torproject.org:9236',
              ],
              'labels'  => {
                'alias' => 'Gitaly-Exporter',
              },
            },
          ],
        },
        [...]
      ]

But ideally those would be configured with automatic targets, below.

## Automatic targets on the internal server

Metrics for the internal server are scraped automatically if the
exporter is configured by the [puppet-prometheus][] module. This is
done almost automatically, apart from the need to open a firewall port
in our configuration. 

To take the `apache_exporter`, as an example, in
`profile::prometheus::apache_exporter`, include the
`prometheus::apache_exporter` class from the upstream Puppet module,
then we open the port to the Prometheus server on the exporter, with:

    Ferm::Rule <<| tag == 'profile::prometheus::server-apache-exporter' |>>

Those rules are declared on the server, in `prometheus::prometheus::server::internal`.

## Web dashboard access

The main web dashboard for the internal Prometheus server should be
accessible at <https://prometheus.torproject.org> using the
well-known, public username.

The dashboard for the external Prometheus server, however, is not
publicly available. To bypass it, use the following commandline to
forward ports over SSH:

    ssh -L 9090:localhost:9090 -L 9091:localhost:9091 -L 9093:localhost:9093 prometheus2.torproject.org

The above will also forward the management interfaces of the
Alertmanager (port 9093) and Pushgateway (9091).

## Alerting

We currently do not do alerting for TPA services with Prometheus. We
do, however, have the Alertmanager setup to do alerting for other
teams on the secondary Prometheus server (`prometheus2`). This
documentation details how that works, but could also eventually cover
the main server, if it eventually replaces [Nagios](howto/nagios) for
alerting ([ticket 29864][]).

In general, the upstream documentation for alerting starts from [the
Alerting Overview](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/latest/overview/) but I have found it to be lacking at times. I
have instead been following [this tutorial](https://ashish.one/blogs/setup-alertmanager/) which was quite
helpful.

### Adding alerts in Puppet

The Alertmanager can (but currently isn't, on the external server)
managed through Puppet, in `profile::prometheus::server::external`.

An alerting rule, in Puppet, is defined like:

        {
          'name' => 'bridgestrap',
          'rules' => [
            'alert' => 'Bridges down',
            'expr'  => 'bridgestrap_fraction_functional < 0.50',
            'for'   => '5m',
            'labels'       =>
            {
              'severity' => 'critical',
              'team'     => 'anti-censorship',
            },
            'annotations'  =>
            {
              'title' => 'Bridges down',
              'description' => 'Too many bridges down',
              # use humanizePercentage when upgrading to prom > 2.11
              'summary' => 'Number of functional bridges is `{{$value}}%`',
              'host' => '{{$labels.instance}}',
            },
          ],
        },

Note that we might want to move those to Hiera so that we could use
YAML code directly, which would better match the syntax of the actual
alerting rules.

### Adding alerts through Git, on the external server

The external server pulls pulls a [git repository](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/) for alerting and
targets regularly. Alerts can be added through that repository by
adding a file in the `rules.d` directory, see [rules.d](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/tree/main/rules.d) directory
for more documentation on that.

Note that alerts (probably?) do not take effect until a sysadmin
reloads Prometheus.

TODO: confirm how rules are deployed.

### Adding alert recipients

To add a new recipient for alerts, look for the `receivers` setting
and add something like this:

    receivers      => [
      {
        'name'          => 'anti-censorship team',
        'email_configs' => [
          'to'          => 'anti-censorship-alerts@lists.torproject.org',
          # see above
          'require_tls' => false,
        ],
      },
      # [...]

Then alerts can be routed to that receiver by adding a "route" in the
`routes` setting. For example, this will route alerts with the `team:
anti-censorship` label:

      routes            => [
        {
          'receiver' => 'anti-censorship team',
          'match'    => {
            'team' => 'anti-censorship',
          },
        },
      ],

### Testing alerts

Normally, alerts should fire on the Prometheus server and be sent out
to the Alertmanager server, if the latter is correctly configured
(ie. if it's configured in `prometheus.yml`, the `alerting` section,
see [Installation](#installation) below).

If you're not sure alerts are working, head to the web dashboard (see
[the access instructions](#web-dashboard-access)) and look at the
`/alerts`, and `/rules` pages. For example, if you're
using port forwarding:

 * <http://localhost:9090/alerts> - should show the configure alerts,
   and if they are firing
 * <http://localhost:9090/rules> - should show the configured rules,
   and whether they match

Typically, the <http://localhost:9093> URL should also be useful to
manage the Alertmanager, but in practice the Debian package does not
ship the web interface, so its interest is limited in that regard. See
the `amtool` section below for more information.

Note that the [`/targets`][] URL is also useful to diagnose problems
with exporters, in general, see also the [troubleshooting section](#troubleshooting-missing-metrics)
below.

If you can't access the dashboard at all or if the above seems too
complicated, [Grafana][] can be jury-rigged as a debugging tool for
metrics as well. In the "Explore" panels, you can input Prometheus
metrics, with auto-completion, and inspect the output directly.

[Grafana]: howto/grafana

### Managing alerts with amtool

Since the Alertmanager web UI is not available in Debian, you need to
use the [amtool](https://manpages.debian.org/amtool.1) command. A few useful commands:

 * `amtool alert`: show firing alerts
 * `amtool silence add --duration=1h --author=anarcat
   --comment="working on it" ALERTNAME`: silence alert ALERTNAME for
   an hour, with some comments

## Migrating from Munin

Here's a quick cheat sheet from people used to Munin and switching to
Prometheus:

| What              | Munin           | Prometheus                          |
| ---               | -----           | ----------                          |
| Scraper           | munin-update    | prometheus                          |
| Agent             | munin-node      | prometheus node-exporter and others |
| Graphing          | munin-graph     | prometheus or grafana               |
| Alerting          | munin-limits    | prometheus alertmanager             |
| Network port      | 4949            | 9100 and others                     |
| Protocol          | TCP, text-based | HTTP, [text-based][]                |
| Storage format    | RRD             | custom TSDB                         |
| Downsampling      | yes             | no                                  |
| Default interval  | 5 minutes       | 15 seconds                          |
| Authentication    | no              | no                                  |
| Federation        | no              | yes (can fetch from other servers)  |
| High availability | no              | yes (alert-manager gossip protocol) |

[text-based]: https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/

Basically, Prometheus is similar to Munin in many ways:

 * it "pulls" metrics from the nodes, although it does it over HTTP
   (to <http://host:9100/metrics>) instead of a custom TCP protocol
   like Munin

 * the agent running on the nodes is called `prometheus-node-exporter`
   instead of `munin-node`. it scrapes only a set of built-in
   parameters like CPU, disk space and so on, different exporters are
   necessary for different applications (like
   `prometheus-apache-exporter`) and any application can easily
   implement an exporter by exposing a Prometheus-compatible
   `/metrics` endpoint

 * like Munin, the node exporter doesn't have any form of
   authentication built-in. we rely on IP-level firewalls to avoid
   leakage

 * the central server is simply called `prometheus` and runs as a
   daemon that wakes up on its own, instead of `munin-update` which is
   called from `munin-cron` and before that `cron`

 * graphics are generated on the fly through the crude Prometheus web
   interface or by frontends like Grafana, instead of being constantly
   regenerated by `munin-graph`

 * samples are stored in a custom "time series database" (TSDB) in
   Prometheus instead of the (ad-hoc) RRD standard
   
 * Prometheus performs *no* downsampling like RRD and Prom relies on
   smart compression to spare disk space, but it uses more than Munin

 * Prometheus scrapes samples much more aggressively than Munin by
   default, but that interval is configurable

 * Prometheus can scale horizontally (by sharding different services
   to different servers) and vertically (by aggregating different
   servers to a central one with a different sampling frequency)
   natively - `munin-update` and `munin-graph` can only run on a
   single (and same) server

 * Prometheus can act as an high availability alerting system thanks
   to its `alertmanager` that can run multiple copies in parallel
   without sending duplicate alerts - `munin-limits` can only run on a
   single server

## Push metrics to the Pushgateway

The [Pushgateway][] is setup on the secondary Prometheus server
(`prometheus2`). Note that you might not need to use the Pushgateway,
see the [article about pushing metrics](https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/pushing/) before going down this route.

The Pushgateway is fairly particular: it listens on port 9091 and gets
data through a fairly simple [curl-friendly commandline](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway#command-line)
[API](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway#api). We have found that, once installed, this command just "does
the right thing", more or less:

    echo 'some_metrics{foo="bar"} 3.14 | curl --data-binary @- http://localhost:9091/metrics/job/jobtest/instance/instancetest

To confirm the data was injected by the Push gateway, this can be
done:

    curl localhost:9091/metrics | head

The Pushgateway is scraped, like other Prometheus jobs, every minute,
with metrics kept for a year, at the time of writing. This is
configured, inside Puppet, in `profile::prometheus::server::external`.

Note that it's [not possible to push timestamps](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway#about-timestamps) into the
Pushgateway, so it's not useful to ingest past historical data.

## Pager playbook

TBD.

### Troubleshooting missing metrics

If metrics do not correctly show up in Grafana, it might be worth
checking in the [Prometheus dashboard](https://prometheus.torproject.org/) itself for the same
metrics. Typically, if they do not show up in Grafana, they won't show
up in Prometheus either, but it's worth a try, even if only to see the
raw data.

Then, if data truly isn't present in Prometheus, you can track down
the "target" (the exporter) responsible for it in the [`/targets`][]
listing. If the target is "unhealthy", it will be marked in red and an
error message will show up.

[`/targets`]: https://prometheus.torproject.org/targets

If the target is marked healthy, the next step is to scrape the
metrics manually. This, for example, will scrape the Apache exporter
from the host `gayi`:

    curl -s http://gayi.torproject.org:9117/metrics | grep apache

In the case of [this bug](https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/pull/541), the metrics were not showing up at all:

    root@hetzner-nbg1-01:~# curl -s http://gayi.torproject.org:9117/metrics | grep apache
    # HELP apache_exporter_build_info A metric with a constant '1' value labeled by version, revision, branch, and goversion from which apache_exporter was built.
    # TYPE apache_exporter_build_info gauge
    apache_exporter_build_info{branch="",goversion="go1.7.4",revision="",version=""} 1
    # HELP apache_exporter_scrape_failures_total Number of errors while scraping apache.
    # TYPE apache_exporter_scrape_failures_total counter
    apache_exporter_scrape_failures_total 18371
    # HELP apache_up Could the apache server be reached
    # TYPE apache_up gauge
    apache_up 0

Notice, however, the `apache_exporter_scrape_failures_total`, which
was incrementing. From there, we reproduced the work the exporter was
doing manually and fixed the issue, which involved passing the correct
argument to the exporter.

### Pushgateway errors

The Pushgateway web interface provides some basic information about
the metrics it collects, and allow you to view the pending metrics
before they get scraped by Prometheus, which may be useful to
troubleshoot issues with the gateway.

To pull metrics by hand, you can pull directly from the pushgateway:

    curl localhost:9091/metrics

If you get this error while pulling metrics from the exporter:

    An error has occurred while serving metrics:

    collected metric "some_metric" { label:<name:"instance" value:"" > label:<name:"job" value:"some_job" > label:<name:"tag" value:"val1" > counter:<value:1 > } was collected before with the same name and label values

It's because similar metrics were sent twice into the gateway, which
corrupts the state of the pushgateway, a [known problems](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/issues/232) in
earlier versions and [fixed in 0.10](https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/pull/290) (Debian bullseye and later). A
workaround is simply to restart the Pushgateway (and clear the
storage, if persistence is enabled, see the `--persistence.file`
flag).

## Disaster recovery

If a Prometheus/Grafana is destroyed, it should be compltely
rebuildable from Puppet. Non-configuration data should be restored
from backup, with `/var/lib/prometheus/` being sufficient to
reconstruct history. If even backups are destroyed, history will be
lost, but the server should still recover and start tracking new
metrics.

# Reference

## Installation

### Puppet implementation

Every TPA server is configured as a `node-exporter` through the
`roles::monitored` that is included everywhere. The role might
eventually be expanded to cover alerting and other monitoring
resources as well. This role, in turn, includes the
`profile::prometheus::client` which configures each client correctly
with the right firewall rules.

The firewall rules are exported from the server, defined in
`profile::prometheus::server`. We hacked around limitations of the
upstream Puppet module to install Prometheus using backported Debian
packages. The monitoring server itself is defined in
`roles::monitoring`.

The [Prometheus Puppet module][] was heavily patched to [allow scrape
job collection][] and [use of Debian packages for
installation][], among [many other patches sent by anarcat](https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/pulls?q=author%3Aanarcat+).

Much of the initial Prometheus configuration was also documented in
[ticket 29681][] and especially [ticket 29388][] which investigates
storage requirements and possible alternatives for data retention
policies.

[ticket 29388]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29388
[ticket 29681]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29681
[use of Debian packages for installation]: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/pull/303
[allow scrape job collection]: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/pull/304
[Prometheus Puppet module]: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/

### Pushgateway

The [Pushgateway][] was configured on the external Prometheus server
to allow for the metrics people to push their data inside Prometheus
without having to write a Prometheus exporter inside Collector.

[Pushgateway]: https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway

This was done directly inside the
`profile::prometheus::server::external` class, but could be moved to a
separate profile if it needs to be deployed internally. It is assumed
that the gateway script will run directly on `prometheus2` to avoid
setting up authentication and/or firewall rules, but this could be
changed.

### Alertmanager

The [Alertmanager][] is configured on the external Prometheus server
for the metrics and anti-censorship teams to monitor the health of the
network. It may eventually also be used to replace or enhance
[Nagios](howto/nagios) ([ticket 29864][]).

It is installed through Puppet, in
`profile::prometheus::server::external`, but could be moved to its own
profile if it is deployed on more than one server.

Note that Alertmanager only dispatches alerts, which are actually
generated on the Prometheus server side of things. Make sure the
following block exists in the `prometheus.yml` file:

    alerting:
      alert_relabel_configs: []
      alertmanagers:
      - static_configs:
        - targets:
          - localhost:9093

### Manual node configuration

External services can be monitored by Prometheus, as long as they
comply with the [OpenMetrics][] protocol, which is simply to expose
metrics such as this over HTTP:

    metric{label=label_val}  value

A real-life (simplified) example:

    node_filesystem_avail_bytes{alias="alberti.torproject.org",device="/dev/sda1",fstype="ext4",mountpoint="/"} 16160059392

The above says that the node alberti has the device `/dev/sda` mounted
on `/`, formatted as an `ext4` filesystem which has 16160059392 bytes
(~16GB) free.

 [OpenMetrics]: https://openmetrics.io/

System-level metrics can easily be monitored by the secondary
Prometheus server. This is usually done by installing the "node
exporter", with the following steps:

 * On Debian Buster and later:

        apt install prometheus-node-exporter

 * On Debian stretch:

        apt install -t stretch-backports prometheus-node-exporter

   ... assuming that backports is already configured. if it isn't, such a line in `/etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.debian.org.list` should suffice:

        deb	https://deb.debian.org/debian/	stretch-backports	main contrib non-free

   ... followed by an `apt update`, naturally.

The firewall on the machine needs to allow traffic on the exporter
port from the server `prometheus2.torproject.org`. Then [open a
ticket][new-ticket] for TPA to configure the target. Make sure to
mention:

 * the hostname for the exporter
 * the port of the exporter (varies according to the exporter, 9100
   for the node exporter)
 * how often to scrape the target, if non-default (default: 15s)

Then TPA needs to hook those as part of a new node `job` in the
`scrape_configs`, in `prometheus.yml`, from Puppet, in
`profile::prometheus::server`.

See also [Adding metrics for users](#adding-metrics-for-users), above.

## Monitored services

Those are the actual services monitored by Prometheus.

### Internal server (prometheus1)

The "internal" server scrapes all hosts managed by Puppet for
TPA. Puppet installs a [`node_exporter`](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter) on *all* servers, which
takes care of metrics like CPU, memory, disk usage, time accuracy, and
so on. Then other exporters might be enabled on specific services,
like email or web servers.

Access to the internal server is fairly public: the metrics there are
not considered to be security sensitive and protected by
authentication only to keep bots away.

### External server (prometheus2)

The "external" server, on the other hand, is more restrictive and does
not allow public access. This is out of concern that specific metrics
might lead to timing attacks against the network and/or leak sensitive
information. The external server also explicitly does *not* scrape TPA
servers automatically: it only scrapes certain services that are
manually configured by TPA.

Those are the services currently monitored by the external server:

 * [bridgestrap](https://bridges.torproject.org/bridgestrap-metrics)
 * [rdsys](https://bridges.torproject.org/rdsys-backend-metrics)
 * OnionPerf external nodes' `node_exporter`s
 * connectivity test on (some?) bridges (using the
   [`blackbox_exporter`](https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter/))

Note that this list might become out of sync with the actual
implementation, look into [Puppet](howto/puppet) in
`profile::prometheus::server::external` for the actual deployment.

## SLA

Prometheus is currently not doing alerting so it doesn't have any sort
of garanteed availability. It should, hopefully, not lose too many
metrics over time so we can do proper long-term resource planning.

## Design

Here is, from the [Prometheus overview documentation][], the
basic architecture of a Prometheus site:

[Prometheus overview documentation]: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prometheus/alertmanager/master/doc/arch.svg" alt="A
drawing of Prometheus' architecture, showing the push gateway and
exporters adding metrics, service discovery through file_sd and
Kubernetes, alerts pushed to the Alertmanager and the various UIs
pulling from Prometheus" />

As you can see, Prometheus is somewhat tailored towards
[Kubernetes][] but it can be used without it. We're deploying it with
the `file_sd` discovery mechanism, where Puppet collects all exporters
into the central server, which then scrapes those exporters every
`scrape_interval` (by default 15 seconds). The architecture graph also
shows the Alertmanager which could be used to (eventually) replace our
Nagios deployment.

[Kubernetes]: https://kubernetes.io/

It does not show that Prometheus can federate to multiple instances
and the Alertmanager can be configured with High availability.

## Pushgateway

The [Pushgateway][] is a separate server from the main Prometheus
server that is designed to "hold" onto metrics for ephemeral jobs that
would otherwise be around long enough for Prometheus to scrape their
metrics. We use it as a workaround to bridge Metrics data with
Prometheus/Grafana.

## Alertmanager

The [Alertmanager][] is a separate program that receives notifications
generated by Prometheus servers through an API, groups, and
deduplicates notifications before sending them by email or other
mechanisms.

[Alertmanager]: https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager

Here's how the internal design of the Alertmanager looks like:

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prometheus/alertmanager/master/doc/arch.svg" alt="Internal architecture of the Alert manager, showing how they get the alerts from Prometheus through an API and internally pushes this through various storage queues and deduplicating notification pipelines, along with a clustered gossip protocol" />

The first deployments of the Alertmanager at TPO do not feature
a "cluster", or high availability (HA) setup.

Alerts are typically sent over email, but Alertmanager also has
builtin support for:

 * Email
 * Slack
 * [Victorops](https://victorops.com) (now Splunk)
 * [Pagerduty](https://pagerduty.com/)
 * [Opsgenie](https://opsgenie.com) (now Atlassian)
 * Wechat

There's also a [generic webhook receiver](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/latest/configuration/#webhook_config) which is typically used
to send notifications. Many other endpoints are implemented through
that webhook, for example:

 * [Cachet](https://github.com/oxyno-zeta/prometheus-cachethq)
 * [Dingtalk](https://github.com/timonwong/prometheus-webhook-dingtalk)
 * [Discord](https://github.com/rogerrum/alertmanager-discord)
 * [Google Chat](https://github.com/mr-karan/calert)
 * [IRC](https://github.com/crisidev/alertmanager_irc)
 * [Matrix](https://github.com/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager) (JS, or [this one](https://github.com/sinnwerkstatt/knopfler) in Python, or [this one](https://github.com/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager))
 * [Mattermost](https://github.com/cpanato/mattermost-plugin-alertmanager)
 * [Microsoft teams](https://github.com/prometheus-msteams/prometheus-msteams)
 * [Phabricator](https://github.com/knyar/phalerts)
 * [Sachet](https://github.com/messagebird/sachet) supports *many* messaging systems (Twilio, Pushbullet,
   Telegram, Sipgate, etc)
 * [Sentry](https://github.com/mikeroll/alertmanager-sentry-gateway)
 * [Signal](https://github.com/dadevel/alertmanager-signal-receiver) (or [Signald](https://github.com/dgl/alertmanager-webhook-signald))
 * [Splunk](https://github.com/sylr/alertmanager-splunkbot)
 * [SNMP](https://github.com/maxwo/snmp_notifier)
 * [Telegram](https://github.com/nopp/alertmanager-webhook-telegram-python) (or [this one](https://github.com/metalmatze/alertmanager-bot))
 * [Twilio](https://github.com/Swatto/promtotwilio)
 * [Wechat](https://github.com/daozzg/work_wechat_robot)
 * [Zabbix](https://github.com/gmauleon/alertmanager-zabbix-webhook) (or [this one](https://github.com/devopyio/zabbix-alertmanager))

And that is only what was available at the time of writing, the
[alertmanager-webhook](https://github.com/topics/alertmanager-webhook) and [alertmanager](https://github.com/topics/alertmanager) tags on GitHub might have more.

The Alertmanager has its own web interface to see and silence alerts,
but there are also alternatives like [Karma](https://karma-dashboard.io/) (previously
Cloudflare's [unsee](https://github.com/cloudflare/unsee)). The web interface is
not shipped with the Debian package, because it depends on the [Elm
compiler](https://github.com/elm/compiler) which is [not in Debian](http://bugs.debian.org/973915). It can be built by hand
using the `debian/generate-ui.sh` script, but only in newer, post
buster versions. Another alternative to consider is [Crochet](https://github.com/simonpasquier/crochet).

In general, when working on alerting, keeping [the "My Philosophy on
Alerting" paper from a Google engineer](https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa8eMWi8zzAn0YfcApr8Q/edit) (now the [Monitoring
distributed systems](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/monitoring-distributed-systems/) chapter of the [Site Reliability
Engineering](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/site-reliability-engineering/9781491929117/) O'Reilly book.

Another issue with alerting in Prometheus is that you can only silence
warnings for a certain amount of time, then you get a notification
again. The [kthxbye bot](https://github.com/prymitive/kthxbye) works around that issue.

## Issues

There is no issue tracker specifically for this project, [File][new-ticket] or
[search][] for issues in the [team issue tracker][search] component.

 [new-ticket]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/new
 [search]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues

## Maintainer, users, and upstream

The Prometheus services have been setup and are managed by anarcat
inside TPA. The internal Prometheus server is mostly used by TPA staff
to diagnose issues. The external Prometheus server is used by various
TPO teams for their own monitoring needs.

The upstream Prometheus projects are diverse and generally active as
of early 2021. Since Prometheus is used as an ad-hoc standard in the
new "cloud native" communities like Kubernetes, it has seen an upsurge
of development and interest from various developers, and
companies. The future of Prometheus should therefore be fairly bright.

The individual exporters, however, can be hit and miss. Some exporters
are "code dumps" from companies and not very well maintained. For
example, [Digital Ocean](https://github.com/digitalocean/) dumped the [bind_exporter](https://github.com/digitalocean/bind_exporter/) on GitHub,
but it was [salvaged](https://github.com/prometheus-community/bind_exporter/issues/55) by the [Prometheus community](https://github.com/prometheus-community/community/issues/15).

Another important layer is the large amount of Puppet code that is
used to deploy Prometheus and its components. This is all part of a
big Puppet module, [puppet-prometheus][], managed by the [voxpupuli
collective](https://github.com/voxpupuli). Our integration with the module is not yet complete:
we have a lot of glue code on top of it to correctly make it work with
Debian packages. A lot of work has been done to complete that work by
anarcat, but work still remains, see [upstream issue 32](https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/issues/32) for
details.

[puppet-prometheus]: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-prometheus/
## Monitoring and testing

Prometheus doesn't have specific tests, but there *is* a test suite in
the upstream prometheus Puppet module.

The server is monitored for basic system-level metrics by Nagios. It
also monitors itself for system-level metrics but also
application-specific metrics.

## Logs and metrics

Prometheus servers typically do not generate many logs, except when
errors and warnings occur. They should hold very little PII. The web
frontends collect logs in accordance with our regular policy.

Actual metrics *may* contain PII, although it's quite unlikely:
typically, data is anonymized and aggregated at collection time. It
would still be able to deduce some activity patterns from the metrics
generated by Prometheus, and use it to leverage side-channel attacks,
which is why the external Prometheus server access is restricted.

## Backups

Prometheus servers should be fully configured through Puppet and
require little backups. The metrics themselves are kept in
`/var/lib/prometheus2` and should be backed up along with our regular
[backup procedures](howto/backup).

## Other documentation

 * [Prometheus home page](https://prometheus.io/)
 * [Prometheus documentation](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/)
 * [Prometheus developer blog](https://www.robustperception.io/tag/prometheus/)

# Discussion

## Overview

The prometheus and [howto/grafana](howto/grafana) services were setup after anarcat
realized that there was no "trending" service setup inside TPA after
Munin had died ([ticket 29681][]). The "node exporter" was deployed on
all TPA hosts in mid-march 2019 ([ticket 29683][]) and remaining
traces of Munin were removed in early April 2019 ([ticket 29682][]).

 [ticket 29683]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29683
 [ticket 29682]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29682

Resource requirements were researched in [ticket 29388][] and it was
originally planned to retain 15 days of metrics. This was expanded to
one year in November 2019 ([ticket 31244][]) with the hope this could
eventually be expanded further with a downsampling server in the
future.

 [ticket 31244]: https://bugs.torproject.org/31244

Eventually, a second Prometheus/Grafana server was setup to monitor
external resources ([ticket 31159][]) because there were concerns
about mixing internal and external monitoring on TPA's side. There
were also concerns on the metrics team about exposing those metrics
publicly.

 [ticket 31159]: https://bugs.torproject.org/31159

It was originally thought Prometheus could completely replace
[howto/nagios](howto/nagios) as well [ticket 29864][], but this turned out to be more
difficult than planned. The main difficulty is that Nagios checks come
with builtin threshold of acceptable performance. But Prometheus
metrics are just that: metrics, without thresholds... This makes it
more difficult to replace Nagios because a ton of alerts need to be
rewritten to replace the existing ones. A lot of reports and
functionality built-in to Nagios, like availability reports,
acknowledgements and other reports, would need to be reimplemented as
well.

## Goals

This section didn't exist when the projec was launched, so this is
really just second-guessing...

### Must have

 * Munin replacement: long-term trending metrics to predict resource
   allocation, with graphing
 * free software, self-hosted
 * Puppet automation

### Nice to have

 * possibility of eventual Nagios phase-out ([ticket 29864][])

 [ticket 29864]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29864

### Non-Goals

 * data retention beyond one year

## Approvals required

Primary Prometheus server was decided [in the Brussels 2019
devmeeting][], before anarcat joined the team ([ticket
29389][]). Secondary Prometheus server was approved in
[meeting/2019-04-08](meeting/2019-04-08). Storage expansion was approved in
[meeting/2019-11-25](meeting/2019-11-25).

 [in the Brussels 2019 devmeeting]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/meetings/2019BrusselsAdminTeamMinutes#Trendingmonitoring
 [ticket 29389]: https://bugs.torproject.org/29389

## Proposed Solution

Prometheus was chosen, see also [howto/grafana](howto/grafana).

## Cost

N/A.

## Alternatives considered

No alternatives research was performed, as far as we know.
