Leadership Election

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 14:18:51 +0100

Overview

The admin API allows you to create and manage resources in your Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM) cluster such as tenants, access policies, and tokens. When performing operations that modify resources such as updates or deletes, the admin API requires the use of resource version numbers to make sure the most recent version of resources are being operated on. An additional, optional, safety feature the admin API can make use of to ensure concurrent modifications don’t overwrite each other is leadership election. This allows admin API components to elect a single component to perform all modification requests, making sure that simultaneous requests don’t overwrite each other. Details about how to use and configure this feature are provided below.

Configuration

Leadership election is an optional, but recommended, feature of the GEM admin API. It can be enabled and configured under the admin_api section of the GEM configuration file. Leadership election uses the same mechanism as other GEM components to coordinate among themselves, the hash ring. This means you’ll need to configure this instance of the ring the same way you configured the ring used by distributors and ingesters when setting up your GEM cluster.

An example of this configuration is provided below using the memberlist gossip ring.

admin_api:
  leader_election:
    enabled: true
    ring:
      kvstore:
        store: memberlist
      tokens_observe_period: 5s

Note that any supported backend (Etcd, Consul, or memberlist) can be used for leader election with the admin API, memberlist is only used as an example here. For simplicity, it is recommended to use whatever ring backend you are already making use of for other GEM components.

Implementation

Admin API leadership election does not require a quorum to operate like other uses of the ring in GEM components. This means it is not required to run an odd number of admin API components. Instead, it is sufficient to run two for redundancy.

Admin API on Grafana Labs

Leadership Election

Overview

Configuration

Implementation