Data storage concepts

Chronosphere uses collectors to ingest data. The Chronosphere Collector pulls metrics data by querying a data source for telemetry.

Late arriving metrics

Prometheus supplies consistent time series, ensuring data is present at collection time. Some data sources opt instead for to push data when telemetry is available. If data isn't available when a Collector expects, it can look like sparse time series. Missing metrics can cause queries to break. In general, Chronosphere can accept late data within a time frame.

• Aggregation accepts late data from two to eight minutes past the expected time.
• Raw data can be written to the database up to two hours late.

Downsampling

Collectors ingest metrics at specific intervals, based on system configuration. This granularity of metric data can be helpful in diagnostic efforts, but particular issues might not be served by such granularity. If you are able to diagnose production issues using a coarser granularity of metric data, downsampling the data reduces the amount of data persisted to the Chronosphere database.

Downsample incoming data in Chronosphere using these methods:

• Change the Chronosphere Collector configuration by changing the rate the Collector publishes metrics to the server.
• Use mapping rules to downsample metrics that aren't aggregated.
• Use rollup rules to downsample aggregated metrics.

Over time, persisted data uses significant storage capacity. Chronosphere performs long-term downsampling to control data storage costs while retaining important statistics.