I have installed Prometheus in a vim using apt install prometheus. I want to configure storage location and retention size. Here is the excerpt from the documentation

Prometheus has several flags that configure local storage. The most important are:

--storage.tsdb.path: Where Prometheus writes its database. Defaults to data/.
--storage.tsdb.retention.time: How long to retain samples in storage. If neither this flag nor storage.tsdb.retention.size is set, the retention time defaults to 15d. Supported units: y, w, d, h, m, s, ms.
--storage.tsdb.retention.size: The maximum number of bytes of storage blocks to retain

I have tried editing the prometheus.yml file and I keep getting an error "unable to unmarshall". Here is what I have tried.

global:
  storage:
    tsdb:
      path: "/data/prometheus"
      retention:
        time: "30d"
        size: "50GB"

I have also tried out side of the global directive. I can't figure out how to configure the storage. Is this the right place to configure this? Or do I edit the systemd file and add them as arguments?

Thanks

I have installed Prometheus in a vim using apt install prometheus. I want to configure storage location and retention size. Here is the excerpt from the documentation

Prometheus has several flags that configure local storage. The most important are:

--storage.tsdb.path: Where Prometheus writes its database. Defaults to data/.
--storage.tsdb.retention.time: How long to retain samples in storage. If neither this flag nor storage.tsdb.retention.size is set, the retention time defaults to 15d. Supported units: y, w, d, h, m, s, ms.
--storage.tsdb.retention.size: The maximum number of bytes of storage blocks to retain

I have tried editing the prometheus.yml file and I keep getting an error "unable to unmarshall". Here is what I have tried.

global:
  storage:
    tsdb:
      path: "/data/prometheus"
      retention:
        time: "30d"
        size: "50GB"

I have also tried out side of the global directive. I can't figure out how to configure the storage. Is this the right place to configure this? Or do I edit the systemd file and add them as arguments?

Thanks

• configuration
• prometheus
• storage

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1 Answer 1

Sorted by: Reset to default 2

I have tried editing the prometheus.yml file and I keep getting an error "unable to unmarshall".
Or do I edit the systemd file and add them as arguments?

Prometheus manages configuration in two ways:

• immutable configs via command line flags
• scraping and rules configuration via configuration file (prometheus.yml)

To configure Prometheus storage options, which is immutable, you can pass the configuration via command line when starting prometheus:

./prometheus --storage.tsdb.path=/data/prometheus --storage.tsdb.retention.time=30d --storage.tsdb.retention.size=50GB

If you are running Prometheus via systemd, simply alter the ExecStart command in prometheus.service file to something like the following:

....
[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/opt/prometheus/prometheus \
  --storage.tsdb.path=/data/prometheus \
  --storage.tsdb.retention.time=30d \
  --storage.tsdb.retention.size=50GB
...

Here is the list of all configuration that are immutable, and need to be configure via command line.