Cortex: A multitenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus as a service

NB this is a pre-release, pre-alpha service. Availability will not be 100%. APIs will change. Data will be lost.

Cortex is an API compatible Prometheus implementation, that natively supports multitenancy and scale-out clustering.

Cortex is a Weaveworks project that forms a major part of Weave Cloud. If you have any questions regarding our hosted Prometheus as a service, please contact help@weave.works.

Getting started

Go to https://cloud.weave.works and sign up. Follow the steps to create a new instance.

Once you have created your instance, note down the 'Service Token' listed underneath 'Probes' in the box on the right of the screen. You will use this token to authenticate your local Prometheus with Weave Cloud.

You can download Prometheus from its website. You will need v1.2.1 or later.

When you've got Prometheus, you will need to configure it to discover your services and also configure it to send its data to Weave Cloud by adding the following top-level stanza to prometheus.yml:

remote_write:
  url: https://cloud.weave.works/api/prom/push
  basic_auth:
    password: <token>

Where <token> is the Service Token you obtained from Weave Cloud.

Once your local Prometheus is running you can enter Prometheus queries into Weave Cloud. Go to https://cloud.weave.works and click the graph icon to the right of the instance selector:

To use the Prometheus Service with Grafana, configure your Grafana instance to have a datasource with the following parameters:

• Type: Prometheus
• Url: https://cloud.weave.works/api/prom
• Access: Direct
• Http Auth: Basic Auth
• User: user (this is ignored, but must be non-empty)
• Password: (the same one your retrieval agent uses)

For more information, please see:

• PromCon 2016 talk video

Or join us on our Slack channel and ask us directly!