Metrics are an essential part of observing any service; without them you'll have significant blind spots. But collecting and analyzing them can be a real challenge -- especially at scale. Not only do you need to solve the basic task of collecting your metrics, but you must do it in a reliable, performant, and robust manner. Nothing is more frustrating than having your metrics pipeline fall on it's face during an outage, or even worse, cause the outage!

Fear not! In this guide we'll build an observability pipeline that will send metrics from Prometheus client to Humio.

Background

What is Humio?

Humio is a time-series logging and aggregation platform for unrestricted, comprehensive event analysis, On-Premises or in the Cloud. With 1TB/day of raw log ingest/node, in-memory stream processing, and live, shareable dashboards and alerts, you can instantly and in real-time explore, monitor, and visualize any system’s data. Metrics are converted to log events via the metric_to_log transform.

Strategy

How This Guide Works

We'll be using Vector to accomplish this task. Vector is a popular open-source observability data platform. It's written in Rust, making it lightweight, ultra-fast and highly reliable. And we'll be deploying Vector as a agent.

What We'll Accomplish

We'll build an observability data platform that:

• Collects metrics from Prometheus client.
  • Enriches data with useful Prometheus client context.
  • Efficiently collects data and checkpoints read positions to ensure data is not lost between restarts.
  • Securely collects data via Transport Layer Security (TLS).
• Sends metrics to Humio.
  • Buffers data in-memory or on-disk for performance and durability.
  • Compresses data to optimize bandwidth.
  • Automatically retries failed requests, with backoff.
  • Securely transmits data via Transport Layer Security (TLS).
  • Batches data to maximize throughput.

All in just a few minutes!

Tutorial

1. Install Vector

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.vector.dev | sh

2. Configure Vector

   cat <<-'VECTORCFG' > ./vector.toml
   [sources.prometheus_scrape]
   type = "prometheus_scrape"
   endpoints = [ "http://localhost:9090/metrics" ]
   
   [sinks.out]
   type = "humio_metrics"
   inputs = [ "prometheus_scrape" ]
   token = "${HUMIO_TOKEN}"
   encoding.codec = "json"
   VECTORCFG

3. Start Vector

   vector --config ./vector.toml

4. Observe Vector

   vector top

   explain this command

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Next Steps

Vector is powerful tool and we're just scratching the surface in this guide. Here are a few pages we recommend that demonstrate the power and flexibility of Vector:

Vector Github repo 4k

Vector is free and open-source!

Vector getting started series

Get setup in just a few minutes

Vector documentation

Everything you need to know about Vector