The Prometheus Pushgateway exists to allow ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Since these kinds of jobs may not exist long enough to be scraped, they can instead push their metrics to a Pushgateway. The Pushgateway then exposes these metrics to Prometheus.

The Pushgateway is explicitly not an aggregator, but rather a metrics cache. It does not have a statsd-like semantics. The metrics pushed are exactly the same as you would present for scraping in a permanently running program.

For machine-level metrics, the textfile collector of the Node exporter is usually more appropriate. The Pushgateway is best used for service-level metrics.

Compile the binary using the provided Makefile (type make).

For the most basic setup, just start the binary. To change the address to listen on, use the -addr flag. The -persistence.file flag allows you to specify a file in which the pushed metrics will be persisted (so that they survive restarts of the Pushgateway).

You can also build from scratch, and just start it as a docker container.

docker build -t xyz/prompush:0.2.0 ./ 
docker run docker run -p 9091:9091 xyz/prompush:0.2.0 

Prometheus client libraries should have a feature to push the registered metrics to a Pushgateway. Usually, a Prometheus client passively presents metric for scraping by a Prometheus server. A client library that supports pushing has a push function, which needs to be called by the client code. It will then actively push the metrics to a Pushgateway, using the API described below.

Using the Prometheus text protocol, pushing metrics is so easy that no separate CLI is provided. Simply use a command-line HTTP tool like curl. Your favorite scripting language has most likely some built-in HTTP capabilities you can leverage here as well.

Caveat: Note that in the text protocol, each line has to end with a line-feed character (aka 'LF' or '\n'). Ending a line in other ways, e.g. with 'CR' aka '\r', 'CRLF' aka '\r\n', or just the end of the packet, will result in a protocol error.

Examples:

• Push a single sample into the group identified by {job="some_job"}:

    echo "some_metric 3.14" | curl --data-binary @- http://pushgateway.example.org:8080/metrics/job/some_job
  

  Since no type information has been provided, some_metric will be of type untyped.

• Push something more complex into the group identified by {job="some_job",instance="some_instance"}:

    cat <<EOF | curl --data-binary @- http://pushgateway.example.org:8080/metrics/job/some_job/instance/some_instance
    # TYPE some_metric counter
    some_metric{label="val1"} 42
    # This one even has a timestamp (but beware, see below).
    some_metric{label="val2"} 34 1398355504000
    # TYPE another_metric gauge
    # HELP another_metric Just an example.
    another_metric 2398.283
    EOF
  

  Note how type information and help strings are provided. Those lines are optional, but strongly encouraged for anything more complex.

• Delete all metrics grouped by job and instance:

    curl -X DELETE http://pushgateway.example.org:8080/metrics/job/some_job/instance/some_instance
  

• Delete all metrics grouped by job only:

    curl -X DELETE http://pushgateway.example.org:8080/metrics/job/some_job
  

The Prometheus server will attach an instance label to each scraped metric that does not already have one. The automatically attached instance label contains the host and port of the target scraped. If a metric already has an instance label, an exporter_instance label is attached instead. (This behavior will be configurable once server issue #490 is fixed.)

However, metrics pushed to the Pushgateway are often on a service level and therefore not related to a particular instance. Not attaching an instance label in that case is not an option because the server will then attach the host and port of the Pushgateway as an instance label (which is actually desired for metrics about the state of the Pushgateway itself).

Therefore, if a metric is pushed to the Pushgateway without an instance label (and without instance label in the grouping key, see below), the Pushgateway will export it with an emtpy instance label ({instance=""}).

If you push metrics at time t₁, you might be tempted to believe that Prometheus will scrape them with that same timestamp t₁. Instead, what Prometheus attaches as a timestamp is the time when it scrapes the push gateway. Why so?

In the world view of Prometheus, a metric can be scraped at any time. A metric that cannot be scraped has basically ceased to exist. Prometheus is somewhat tolerant, but if it cannot get any samples for a metric in 5min, it will behave as if that metric does not exist anymore. Preventing that is actually one of the reasons to use a push gateway. The push gateway will make the metrics of your ephemeral job scrapable at any time. Attaching the time of pushing as a timestamp would defeat that purpose because 5min after the last push, your metric will look as stale to Prometheus as if it could not be scraped at all anymore. (Prometheus knows only one timestamp per sample, there is no way to distinguish a 'time of pushing' and a 'time of scraping'.)

You can still force Prometheus to attach a different timestamp by using the optional timestamp field in the exchange format. However, there are very few use cases where that would make sense. (Essentially, if you push more often than every 5min, you could attach the time of pushing as a timestamp.)

All pushes are done via HTTP. The interface is vaguely REST-like.

The default port the push gateway is listening to is 8080. The path looks like

/metrics/job/<JOBNAME>{/<LABEL_NAME>/<LABEL_VALUE>}

<JOBNAME> is used as the value of the job label, followed by any number of other label pairs (which might or might not include an instance label). The label set defined by the URL path is used as a grouping key. Any of those labels already set in the body of the request (as regular labels, e.g. name{job="foo"} 42) will be overwritten to match the labels defined by the URL path!

Note that / cannot be used as part of a label value or the job name, even if escaped as %2F. (The decoding happens before the path routing kicks in, cf. the Go documentation of URL.Path.)

There is a deprecated version of the URL path, using jobs instead of job:

/metrics/jobs/<JOBNAME>[/instances/<INSTANCENAME>]

If this version of the URL path is used with the instances part, it is equivalent to the URL path above with an instance label, i.e.

/metrics/jobs/foo/instances/bar

is equivalent to

/metrics/job/foo/instance/bar

(Note the missing pluralizations.)

However, if the instances part is missing, the Pushgateway will automatically use the IP number of the pushing host as the 'instance' label, and grouping happens by 'job' and 'instance' labels.

Example: Pushing metrics from host 1.2.3.4 using the deprecated URL path

/metrics/jobs/foo

is equivalent to pushing using the URL path

/metrics/job/foo/instance/1.2.3.4

PUT is used to push a group of metrics. All metrics with the grouping key specified in the URL are replaced by the metrics pushed with PUT.

The body of the request contains the metrics to push either as delimited binary protocol buffers or in the simple flat text format (both in version 0.0.4, see the data exposition format specification). Discrimination between the two variants is done via the Content-Type header. (In case of an unknown value for Content-Type, the text format is tried as a fall-back.)

The response code upon success is always 202 (even if the same grouping key has never been used before, i.e. there is no feedback to the client if the push has replaced an existing group of metrics or created a new one).

If using the protobuf format, do not send duplicate MetricFamily proto messages (i.e. more than one with the same name) in one push, as they will overwrite each other.

A successfully finished request means that the pushed metrics are queued for an update of the storage. Scraping the push gateway may still yield the old results until the queued update is processed. Neither is there a guarantee that the pushed metrics are persisted to disk. (A server crash may cause data loss. Or the push gateway is configured to not persist to disk at all.)

POST works exactly like the PUT method but only metrics with the same name as the newly pushed metrics are replaced (among those with the same grouping key).

DELETE is used to delete metrics from the push gateway. The request must not contain any content. All metrics with the grouping key specified in the URL are deleted.

The response code upon success is always 202. The delete request is merely queued at that moment. There is no guarantee that the request will actually be executed or that the result will make it to the persistence layer (e.g. in case of a server crash). However, the order of PUT/POST and DELETE request is guaranteed, i.e. if you have successfully sent a DELETE request and then send a PUT, it is guaranteed that the DELETE will be processed first (and vice versa).

Deleting a grouping key without metrics is a no-op and will not result in an error.

Caution: Up to version 0.1.1 of the Pushgateway, a DELETE request using the following path in the URL would delete all metrics with the job label 'foo':

/metrics/jobs/foo

Newer versions will interpret the above URL path as deprecated (see above). Consequently, they will add the IP number of the client as an instance label and then delete all metrics with the corresponding job and instance label as their grouping key.

The normal binary embeds the files in resources. For development purposes, it is handy to have a running binary use those files directly (so that you can see the effect of changes immediately). To switch to direct usage, type make bindata-debug just before compiling the binary. Switch back to "normal" mode by typing make bindata-embed. (Just make after a resource has changed will result in the same.)

Relevant style guidelines are the Go Code Review Comments and the Formatting and style section of Peter Bourgon's Go: Best Practices for Production Environments.