Jobs and instances

In Prometheus terms, an endpoint you can scrape is called an instance, usually corresponding to a single process. A collection of instances with the same purpose, a process replicated for scalability or reliability for example, is called a job.

For example, an API server job with four replicated instances:

  • job: api-server
    • instance 1: 1.2.3.4:5670
    • instance 2: 1.2.3.4:5671
    • instance 3: 5.6.7.8:5670
    • instance 4: 5.6.7.8:5671

Automatically generated labels and time series

When Prometheus scrapes a target, it attaches some labels automatically to the scraped time series which serve to identify the scraped target:

  • job: The configured job name that the target belongs to.
  • instance: The <host>:<port> part of the target's URL that was scraped.

If either of these labels are already present in the scraped data, the behavior depends on the honor_labels configuration option. See the scrape configuration documentation for more information.

For each instance scrape, Prometheus stores a sample in the following time series:

  • up{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: 1 if the instance is healthy, i.e. reachable, or 0 if the scrape failed.
  • scrape_duration_seconds{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: duration of the scrape.
  • scrape_samples_post_metric_relabeling{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: the number of samples remaining after metric relabeling was applied.
  • scrape_samples_scraped{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: the number of samples the target exposed.
  • scrape_series_added{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: the approximate number of new series in this scrape. New in v2.10

The up time series is useful for instance availability monitoring.

With the extra-scrape-metrics feature flag several addditonal metrics are available:

  • scrape_timeout_seconds{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: The configured scrape_timeout for a target.
  • scrape_sample_limit{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: The configured sample_limit for a target. Returns zero if there is no limit configured.
  • scrape_body_size_bytes{job="<job-name>", instance="<instance-id>"}: The uncompressed size of the most recent scrape response, if successful. Scrapes failing because body_size_limit is exceeded report -1, other scrape failures report 0.

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