PromCon 2021 preview: Prometheus remote write, Cortex blocks storage, histograms, and more

Who’s ready to dive into all things Prometheus?

PromCon Online 2021 will be an all-day virtual event dedicated to the Prometheus monitoring system on Monday, May 3, as a co-located event of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

The contributors and maintainers on the Grafana Labs team will be among the thousands of active Prometheus users and enthusiasts streaming the conference, and several Grafanistas are scheduled to share their latest learnings about Prometheus and monitoring. (Don’t miss out! There’s still time to register for the event.)

Grafana Labs Director of Community (and PromCon organizer) Richard “Richi” Hartmann will bookend the jam-packed day with opening remarks starting at 10:00 CEST and closing remarks that begin at 17:55 CEST. Here’s a preview of everything in between that will be presented by the Grafana Labs team: 

Making Prometheus more open
10:10 - 10:40 CEST 
Grafana Labs Director of Community and Prometheus maintainer Richard “Richi” Hartmann will provide an overview of how the Prometheus team is actively working to make the community even more open and more welcoming.

How we converted our Cortex data to TSDB blocks
11:45 - 12:15 CEST
Grafana Labs Software Engineer Peter Štibraný will walk through how his team wrote scalable tooling to convert hundreds of terabytes of Grafana Labs’ data in Cortex to TSDB blocks. Štibraný will also share details from Prometheus TSDB internals and just how simple it is to generate TSDB blocks using Go code — plus what pitfalls to avoid.

The future is bright, the future is Prometheus remote write
13:55 - 14:25 CEST
Grafana Labs VP Product and Prometheus maintainer Tom Wilkie will discuss the use cases for pushing data to Prometheus via remote write — and more importantly, what it’s not meant for. He’ll also present a more thorough specification of the protocol and some of the future plans, including what a remote write v2 might look like. (Streaming? Metadata? Exemplars?)

A new kid in histogram town
15:05 - 15:35 CEST
Grafana Labs engineer and Prometheus maintainer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein will discuss his work to make better histograms in Prometheus a reality. Guided by a design doc with the momentous title “Sparse high-resolution histograms for Prometheus,” Rabenstein will outline how the team is currently working to improve histograms and tell you what works and what the next steps will be.

New matchers in the Alertmanager config and silences
17:30 - 17:35 CEST
Former Grafana Labs software engineering intern Atibhi Agrawal will deliver a lightning talk that walks through the newly added matchers in Prometheus Alertmanager. 

We look forward to seeing you (virtually!) at PromCon 2021! And to catch up on all of the latest Prometheus-related news at Grafana Labs, check out our blog.