Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Documentation Grafana Mimir Migration guides Migrating from Thanos or Prometheus to Grafana Mimir

Migrating from Thanos or Prometheus to Grafana Mimir

This document guides an operator through the process of migrating a deployment of Thanos or Prometheus to Grafana Mimir.

Overview

Grafana Mimir stores series in TSDB blocks uploaded in an object storage bucket. These blocks are the same as those used by Prometheus and Thanos. Each project stores blocks in different places and uses different block metadata files.

Configuring remote write to Grafana Mimir

For configuration of remote write to Grafana Mimir, refer to Configuring Prometheus remote write.

Uploading historic blocks to the Grafana Mimir storage bucket

Prometheus stores TSDB blocks in the path specified in the --storage.tsdb.path flag.

To find all blocks directories in the TSDB <STORAGE TSDB PATH>, run the following command:

bash Copy

find <STORAGE TSDB PATH> -name chunks -exec dirname {} \;

Grafana Mimir supports multiple tenants and stores blocks with a tenant prefix. With multi-tenancy disabled, there is a single tenant called anonymous.

Copy each directory output from the previous command to the Grafana Mimir object storage bucket with your tenant prefix.

• For AWS S3, use the aws tool in the following command:

bash Copy

aws s3 cp <DIRECTORY> s3://<TENANT>/<DIRECTORY>

• For Google Cloud Storage (GCS), use the gsutil tool in the following command:

bash Copy

gsutil -m cp -r <DIRECTORY> gs://<TENANT>/<DIRECTORY>

Migrating the block meta.json metadata using metaconvert

Every block has a meta.json metadata file used by Grafana Mimir, Prometheus, and Thanos to identify the block contents. Each project has its own metadata conventions. The metaconvert tool migrates the meta.json metadata from one project to another.

Downloading metaconvert

• If you are using Docker, run the following command:

bash Copy

docker pull grafana/metaconvert:latest

• If you are using a release binary, download the appropriate release asset for your operating system and architecture and make it executable. For Linux with the AMD64 architecture, run the following command:

bash Copy

curl -LO https://github.com/grafana/mimir/releases/latest/download/metaconvert-linux-amd64
chmod +x metaconvert-linux-amd64

• If you are using Go, run the following command:

bash Copy

go install github.com/grafana/mimir/cmd/metaconvert@latest

Running metaconvert

Warning: The metaconvert tool modifies objects in place. Ensure you enable bucket versioning or have backups before running the tool.

To run metaconvert, provide it with the bucket configuration. Use metaconvert -h to list available parameters.

1. Complete one of the following steps to run metaconvert in a dry-run mode, which lists blocks for migration.

   • If you are using Docker, run the following command:
   bash Copy

   docker run grafana/metaconvert -backend=gcs -gcs.bucket-name=bucket -tenant=anonymous -dry-run

   • If you are using a local binary, run the following command:
   bash Copy

   ./metaconvert -backend=filesystem -filesystem.dir=/bucket -tenant=anonymous -dry-run

2. Remove the -dry-run flag to apply the migration.

3. Verify the migration by re-running the tool with -dry-run and confirming that no changes are required.