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Grafana Phlare Configure the Server Configuring memberlist
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Configuring Grafana Phlare memberlist

In March 2023, Grafana Labs acquired Pyroscope, the company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling project. As a result, the Pyroscope and Grafana Phlare projects will be merged under the new name Grafana Pyroscope. To learn more, read our recent blog post about the news.

Hash rings are a distributed consistent hashing scheme and are widely used by Grafana Phlare for sharding and replication.

Grafana Phlare only support hash ring via memberlist protocol.

You can configure memberlist either via the CLI flag or its respective YAML config option.

Memberlist

Grafana Phlare uses memberlist as the KV store backend.

At startup, a Grafana Phlare instance connects to other Phlare replicas to join the cluster. A Grafana Phlare instance discovers the other replicas to join by resolving the addresses configured in -memberlist.join. The -memberlist.join CLI flag must resolve to other replicas in the cluster and can be specified multiple times.

The -memberlist.join can be set to:

  • An address in the <ip>:<port> format.
  • An address in the <hostname>:<port> format.
  • An address in the DNS service discovery format.

The default port is 7946.

Note: At a minimum, configure one or more addresses that resolve to a consistent subset of replicas (for example, all the ingesters).

Note: If you’re running Grafana Phlare in Kubernetes, define a headless Kubernetes Service which resolves to the IP addresses of all Grafana Phlare pods. Then you set -memberlist.join to dnssrv+<service name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:<port>.

Grafana Phlare supports TLS for memberlist connections between its components.

To see all supported configuration parameters, refer to memberlist.

Configuring the memberlist address and port

By default, Grafana Phlare memberlist protocol listens on address 0.0.0.0 and port 7946. If you run multiple Phlare processes on the same node or the port 7946 is not available, you can change the bind and advertise port by setting the following parameters:

  • -memberlist.bind-addr: IP address to listen on the local machine.
  • -memberlist.bind-port: Port to listen on the local machine.
  • -memberlist.advertise-addr: IP address to advertise to other Phlare replicas. The other replicas will connect to this IP to talk to the instance.
  • -memberlist.advertise-port: Port to advertise to other Phlare replicas. The other replicas will connect to this port to talk to the instance.

Fine tuning memberlist changes propagation latency

The phlare_ring_oldest_member_timestamp metric can be used to measure the propagation of hash ring changes. This metric tracks the oldest heartbeat timestamp across all instances in the ring. You can execute the following query to measure the age of the oldest heartbeat timestamp in the ring:

max(time() - phlare_ring_oldest_member_timestamp{state="ACTIVE"})

The measured age shouldn’t be higher than the configured <prefix>.heartbeat-period plus a reasonable delta (for example, 15 seconds). If you experience a higher changes propagation latency, you can adjust the following settings:

  • Decrease -memberlist.gossip-interval
  • Increase -memberlist.gossip-nodes
  • Decrease -memberlist.pullpush-interval
  • Increase -memberlist.retransmit-factor

About Grafana Phlare DNS service discovery

Some clients in Grafana Phlare support service discovery via DNS to locate the addresses of backend servers to connect to. The following clients support service discovery via DNS:

Supported discovery modes

DNS service discovery supports different discovery modes. You select a discovery mode by adding one of the following supported prefixes to the address:

  • dns+
    The domain name after the prefix is looked up as an A/AAAA query. For example: dns+memcached.local:11211.
  • dnssrv+
    The domain name after the prefix is looked up as a SRV query, and then each SRV record is resolved as an A/AAAA record. For example: dnssrv+_memcached._tcp.memcached.namespace.svc.cluster.local.
  • dnssrvnoa+
    The domain name after the prefix is looked up as a SRV query, with no A/AAAA lookup made after that. For example: dnssrvnoa+_memcached._tcp.memcached.namespace.svc.cluster.local.

If no prefix is provided, the provided IP or hostname is used without pre-resolving it.