About
All data stored and manipulated are time series in Prometheus server making it a time serie database.
Every time series is uniquely identified by:
- its metric name
- and optional key-value pairs called labels.
Prometheus may generate temporary derived time series as the result of queries.
Time Serie can be seen as the message format (Sort of relational data) that is stored, processed and returned in the prometheus data flow.
Management
Name
Given a metric name and a set of labels, time series are frequently identified using this notation:
<metric name>{<label name>=<label value>, ...}
This is the same notation that OpenTSDB uses.
Example: a time series with:
- the metric name api_http_requests_total
- the labels:
- method=“POST”
- handler=“/messages”
api_http_requests_total{method="POST", handler="/messages"}
Creation
- Changing any label value, including adding or removing a label, will create a new time series.