Thanos provides a global query view, high availability, data backup with historical, cheap data access as its core features in a single binary.
Those features can be deployed independently of each other. This allows you to have a subset of Thanos features ready for immediate benefit or testing, while also making it flexible for gradual roll outs in more complex environments.
In this quick-start guide, we will explain:
- How to ask questions, build and contribute to Thanos.
- A few common ways of deploying Thanos.
- Links for further reading.
Thanos will work in cloud native environments as well as more traditional ones. Some users run Thanos in Kubernetes while others on the bare metal.
Thanos aims for a simple deployment and maintenance model. The only dependencies are:
- One or more Prometheus v2.2.1+ installations with persistent disk.
- Optional object storage
- Thanos is able to use many different storage providers, with the ability to add more providers as necessary.
You can find the latest Thanos release here.
Main should be stable and usable. Every commit to main builds docker image named main-<data>-<sha> in quay.io/thanos/thanos and thanosio/thanos dockerhub (mirror)
We also perform minor releases every 6 weeks.
During that, we build tarballs for major platforms and release docker images.
See release process docs for details.
Thanos is built purely in Golang, thus allowing to run Thanos on various x64 operating systems.
Thanos can not be downloaded nor installed via the go get or go install methods. Starting in Go 1.17, installing executables with go get is deprecated. go install may be used instead. However, in order to avoid ambiguity, when go install is used with a version suffix, all arguments must refer to main packages in the same module at the same version. If that module has a go.mod file, it must not contain directives like replace or exclude that would cause it to be interpreted differently if it were the main module.
Thanos uses the directive replace. The reason is to provide a way to unblock ourselves promptly while also being flexible in the packages that we (re)use. Support for go install is not likely at this point.
If you want to build Thanos from source you would need a working installation of the Go 1.18+ toolchain (GOPATH, PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:${PATH}). Next one should make a clone of our repository:
git clone git@github.com:thanos-io/thanos.git
When you have access to the source code locally, we have prepared a Makefile. Invoke this by using make in your CLI. For example make help will list all options. For building Thanos one could use make build
The thanos binary should now be in your project folder and is the only thing required to deploy any of its components.
Contributions are very welcome! See our CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.
Thanos is an open source project and we value and welcome new contributors and members of the community. Here are ways to get in touch with the community:
- Slack: #thanos
- Issue Tracker: GitHub Issues
See MAINTAINERS.md.
Thanos is not tied to Kubernetes. However, Kubernetes, Thanos and Prometheus are part of the CNCF so the most popular applications are on top of Kubernetes.
Our friendly community maintains a few different ways of installing Thanos on Kubernetes. See those below:
- prometheus-operator: Prometheus operator has support for deploying Prometheus with Thanos
- kube-thanos: Jsonnet based Kubernetes templates.
- Community Helm charts
If you want to add yourself to this list, let us know!
- Detailed, free, in-browser interactive tutorial as Killercoda Thanos Course
- Quick Tutorial on Thanos website.
See up to date jsonnet mixins We also have example Grafana dashboards here and some alerts to get you started.
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2024
- 6 Learnings from Building Thanos Project
- Monitoring the World: Scaling Thanos in Dynamic Prometheus Environments
- Scaling Thanos at Reddit
- Thanos Project Updates
- Connecting Thanos to the Outer Rim via Query API
- Multiverse of Thanos: Making Thanos Multi-Tenanted
- Thanos Receiver Deep Dive
- From UI to Storage: Unraveling the Magic of Thanos Query Processing
- Thanos’ Infinity Stones and How You Can Operate Them!
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2023
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2022
- Story of Correlation: Integrating Thanos Metrics with Observability Signals
- Running the Observability As a Service For Your Teams With Thanos
- Monitoring multiple Kubernetes Clusters with Thanos
- Thanos: Scaling Prometheus 101
- MaaS for the Masses: Build Your Monitoring-as-a-Service Solution With Prometheus
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See Integrations page.
We don't recommend running Thanos on a single node on production. Thanos is designed and built to run as a distributed system. Vanilla Prometheus might be totally enough for small setups.
However, in case you want to play and run Thanos components on a single node, we recommend following the port layout:
| Component | Interface | Port |
|---|---|---|
| Sidecar | gRPC | 10901 |
| Sidecar | HTTP | 10902 |
| Query | gRPC | 10903 |
| Query | HTTP | 10904 |
| Store | gRPC | 10905 |
| Store | HTTP | 10906 |
| Receive | gRPC (store API) | 10907 |
| Receive | HTTP (remote write API) | 10908 |
| Receive | HTTP | 10909 |
| Rule | gRPC | 10910 |
| Rule | HTTP | 10911 |
| Compact | HTTP | 10912 |
| Query Frontend | HTTP | 10913 |
You can see example one-node setup here.