Using rules to modify or monitor metrics as they are received - Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

Using rules to modify or monitor metrics as they are received

You can set up rules to act upon metrics as they are received by Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. These rules can monitor the metrics or even create new, computed, metrics based on the metrics received.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus supports two types of rules that it evaluates at regular intervals:

  • Recording rules allow you to precompute frequently needed or computationally expensive expressions and save their results as a new set of time series. Querying the precomputed result is often much faster than running the original expression every time it is needed.

  • Alerting rules allow you to define alert conditions based on PromQL and a threshold. When the rule triggers the threshold, a notification is sent to alert manager, which can be configured to managed the rules, or forward them to notification downstream to receivers such as Amazon Simple Notification Service.

To use rules in Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, you create one or more YAML rules files that define the rules. An Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus rules file has the same format as a rules file in standalone Prometheus. For more information, see Defining Recording rules and Alerting rules in the Prometheus documentation.

You can have multiple rules files in a workspace. Each separate rules file is contained within a separate namespace. Having multiple rules files lets you import existing Prometheus rules files to a workspace without having to change or combine them. Different rule group namespaces can also have different tags.

Rule sequencing

Within a rules file, rules are contained within rules groups. Rules within a single rules group in a rules file are always evaluated in order from top to bottom. Therefore, in recording rules, the result of one recording rule can be used in the computation of a later recording rule or in an alerting rule in the same rule group. However, because you can't specify the order in which to run separate rules files, you can't use the results from one recording rule to compute a rule in a different rule group or a different rules file.

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