Set up your Prometheus remote write integration

You can get Prometheus data flowing in New Relic with just a few simple steps. This page covers basic setup for the remote write integration, as well as a few common troubleshooting topics. For information on integrating Prometheus servers in a high availability (HA) configuration, see our Prometheus high availability documentation.

Set up the integration

Go to the Prometheus remote write setup launcher in New Relic One, then complete these steps.

1. Enter a name for the Prometheus server to be connected and your remote_write URL. Important: The name you enter for the server will create an attribute on your data. It will also be the name that identifies which Prometheus server is sending data to New Relic.

2. Add a new remote_write URL to your Prometheus YML file. Add this information under global_config in the file, at the same indentation level as the global section.

   Use the following syntax:

   remote_write: 
   - url: https://metric-api.newrelic.com/prometheus/v1/write?prometheus_server=YOUR_DATA_SOURCE_NAME  
     bearer_token:YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

   OR

   remote_write: 
   - url: https://metric-api.newrelic.com/prometheus/v1/write?X-License-Key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY&prometheus_server=YOUR_DATA_SOURCE_NAME
   

   European Union accounts: If you're connecting from the EU, use the following URL:

   https://metric-api.eu.newrelic.com/prometheus/v1/write

   Kubernetes and Helm remote write integrations: Add the remote write URL to your Helm values.yaml file. Replace remoteWrite: [] with two lines similar to the following example. Be sure to use your remote write URL and use indentation that matches the rest of the file:

   remoteWrite: 
   - url: https://metric-api.newrelic.com/prometheus/v1/write?prometheus_server=YOUR_DATA_SOURCE_NAME 
     bearerToken:YOUR_LICENSE_KEY
   

3. Restart your Prometheus server.

4. View your data in the New Relic UI. For example, use the remote write dashboard we automatically create when you set up your integration.

Mapping of Prometheus metric types

The Prometheus remote write protocol does not include metric type information or other helpful metric metadata when sending metrics to New Relic. Because the remote write protocol doesn't include this information, New Relic infers the metric type based on Prometheus naming conventions. Metrics not following these naming conventions may not be mapped correctly.

New Relic maps Prometheus metrics types into New Relic metric types based on Prometheus metric naming conventions as follows:

• metricName_bucket is stored as a New Relic count metric type.
• metricName_count is stored as a New Relic count metric type.
• metricName_total is stored as a New Relic count metric type.
• metricName_sum is stored as a New Relic summary metric type.

Everything else is stored as a New Relic gauge metric type.

Override metric type mappings

If you have metrics that don't follow Prometheus naming conventions, you can configure remote-write to tag the metric with a newrelic_metric_type label that indicates the metric type. This label is stripped when received by New Relic.

Example: You have a counter metric named my_counter, which does not have our naming convention suffix of _bucket, _count or _total. In this situation, your metric would be identified as a gauge rather than a counter. To correct this, add the following relabel configuration to your prometheus.yml:

- url: https://metric-api.newrelic.com/prometheus/v1/write?X-License-Key=...
  write_relabel_configs:
  - source_labels: [__name__]
    regex: ^my_counter$
    target_label: newrelic_metric_type
    replacement: "counter"
    action: replace 

This rule matches any metric with the name my_counter and adds a newrelic_metric_type label that identifies it as a counter. You can use the following (case sensitive) values as the replacement value:

• counter
• gauge
• summary

When a newrelic_metric_type label is present on a metric received and set to one of the valid values, New Relic will assign the indicated type to the metric (and strip the label) before downstream consumption in the data pipeline. If you have multiple metrics that don't follow the above naming conventions, you can add multiple rules with each rule matching different source labels.

Customize remote write behavior

You can customize the following parameters if you are writing to more than one account in New Relic or are connecting more than one Prometheus data source to the same account in New Relic. For more information, see the docs on remote write tuning.

X-License Key

Your account's license key is not an API key. The license key is used for authentication and to identify which account to write data into. If you are configuring Prometheus to write into different New Relic accounts or sub-accounts, use a different key on each remote write URL.

prometheus_server URL parameter

The prometheus_server parameter is a label or attribute used to add to stats that are written to NRDB. Use this same label when configuring your Grafana data source to limit results to just those from a particular prometheus_server.

Optimize throughput and memory consumption

Remote write increases the total memory consumption of your Prometheus servers.

If you're experiencing issues we recommend the following:

• Increase max_samples_per_send for higher throughput workloads, along a proportional increase in capacity.
• If memory consumption is still a problem, try limiting the number of max_shards per server.

Troubleshoot error messages

If you receive an integration error message from New Relic or error messages in your Prometheus server logs after restarting your Prometheus server, review our remote write troubleshooting documentation. This includes fixing common errors, such as missing or incorrect characters, bad requests, request entity too large, and rate limit errors.

Remove the integration

When you remove the Prometheus remote write integration, this stops new data from flowing, but it will not purge or remove any historical data. To remove the integration, remove the configuration code snippet from your Prometheus YML file, then restart the server.

For more help