How Prometheus Indexes Data and Why You Should Care

Dive into the intricacies of Prometheus data indexing in this 17-minute conference talk by Harkishen Singh from Timescale, presented at a CNCF event. Explore the on-disk layout and data structures used for storing metric samples, gaining a visual understanding of data access complexity and costs. Learn how Prometheus efficiently manages large volumes of metric data, and discover the importance of good query performance for extracting valuable insights. Understand the impact of cardinality management and how PromQL queries utilize indexing to enhance execution speed. Develop an intuitive grasp of Prometheus' inner workings to optimize your system monitoring and performance analysis.