Thanos: Powerful Metrics Definition and Alerting for Prometheus

Thanos is a fascinating open-source project found on GitHub. It's designed to transform any Prometheus setup into a robust monitoring system. It elegantly enhances the scalability, availability, and responsiveness of Prometheus, bolstering its functionalities in multiple ways.

Project Overview:

Thanos takes Prometheus, one of the leading open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkits, and supercharges it, adding high availability, more straightforward installation, seamless upgrades, and no vendor lock-ins, among many other benefits. It caters to developers, system administrators, and businesses who may be seeking ways to inject more redundancy, resilience, and longevity into their systems monitoring activities.

Project Features:

Some commendable features of the Thanos project include its ability to deploy it as a single binary on standard hardware with no hard dependency, simplifying operational complexity. It offers Global querying across all connected Prometheus servers, retaining all the Prometheus features while adding more. It brings unlimited retention of your metrics, beyond what local storage allows for performing historical analysis or trends over the years, seasonality complications, and compliance reasons.

Technology Stack:

Thanos primarily leverages the Go programming language, and it's designed around the concept of a robust API driven by the gRPC protocol, allowing it to be massively scalable. It uses Prometheus for it's monitoring and alerting and it’s hosted on Kubernetes, a portable, extensible, and open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.

Project Structure and Architecture:

The Thanos project is structured into several components such as Thanos Query, which can deduplicate and merge metrics collected from the different Prometheus servers. Thanos Rule evaluates Prometheus recording and alerting rules, and Thanos Sidecar runs close to Prometheus. Each module fulfills a distinct task within the project's larger architecture.

Contribution Guidelines:

Being an open-source project, Thanos encourages contributions from the open-source community. Both minor and major contributions are welcome. They could be improving documentation, adding new features, or even reporting bugs. The project's maintainers aim for a quick and accurate review of all Pull Requests and are always keen on suggestions, improvements, or any changes proposed by the community.