Prometheus export / import data for backup

Question

How do you export and import data in Prometheus? How do you make sure the data is backed up if the instance gets down?

It does not seem that there is a such feature yet, how do you do then?

Answer 1

Since Prometheus version 2.1 it is possible to ask the server for a snapshot. The documentation provides more details - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101000000/https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/2.1/querying/api/#snapshot

Once a snapshot is created, it can be copied somewhere for safe keeping and if required a new server can be created using this snapshot as its database.

The documentation website constantly changes all the URLs, this links to fairly recent documentation on this - https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/querying/api/#tsdb-admin-apis

Answer 2

There is no export and especially no import feature for Prometheus.

If you need to keep data collected by prometheus for some reason, consider using the remote write interface to write it somewhere suitable for archival, such as InfluxDB (configured as a time-series database).

Prometheus isn't a long term storage: if the database is lost, the user is expected to shrug, mumble "oh well", and restart Prometheus.

credits and many thanks to amorken from IRC #prometheus.

Answer 3

There is an option to enable Prometheus data replication to remote storage backend. Later the data collected from multiple Prometheus instances could be backed up in one place on the remote storage backend. See, for example, how VictoriaMetrics remote storage can save time and network bandwidth when creating backups to S3 or GCS with vmbackup utility.