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Configure native histograms

Prometheus native histograms ingestion is an experimental feature of Grafana Mimir.

You can configure native histograms ingestion via the Prometheus remote write API endpoint globally or per tenant.

Note

To enable support for querying native histograms together with Grafana Mimir query sharding, make sure that the flag -query-frontend.query-result-response-format is set to its default protobuf value on query frontends.

Configure native histograms globally

To enable ingesting Prometheus native histograms over the remote write API endpoint for all tenants, set the flag -ingester.native-histograms-ingestion-enabled=true on the ingesters.

To limit the number of native histogram buckets per sample, set the -validation.max-native-histogram-buckets flag on the distributors. The recommended value is 160 which is the default in the OpenTelemetry SDK for exponential histograms. Exponential histograms in OpenTelemetry are a similar concept to Prometheus native histograms. At the time of ingestion, samples with more buckets than the limit will be scaled down, meaning that the resolution will be reduced and buckets will be merged until either the number of buckets is under the limit or the minimal resolution is reached. The behavior can be changed to dropping such samples by setting the -validation.reduce-native-histogram-over-max-buckets option to false.

Configure native histograms per tenant

To enable ingesting Prometheus native histograms over the remote write API for a tenant, set the native_histograms_ingestion_enabled runtime value to true.

To limit the number of native histogram buckets per sample for a tenant, set the max_native_histogram_buckets runtime value. The recommended value is 160 which is the default in the OpenTelemetry SDK for exponential histograms. Exponential histograms in OpenTelemetry are a similar concept to Prometheus native histograms. At the time of ingestion, samples with more buckets than the limit will be scaled down, meaning that the resolution will be reduced and buckets will be merged until either the number of buckets is under the limit or the minimal resolution is reached. The behavior can be changed to dropping such samples by setting the -validation.reduce-native-histogram-over-max-buckets option to false.

yaml 
overrides:
  tenant1:
    native_histograms_ingestion_enabled: true
    max_native_histogram_buckets: 160

To learn more about sending native histograms to Mimir or Grafana Cloud Metrics via Grafana Alloy or Prometheus, see Scrape and send native histograms with Grafana Alloy or Scrape and send native histograms with Prometheus.