Integrate TiDB Cloud with Prometheus and Grafana

TiDB Cloud provides a Prometheus API endpoint. If you have a Prometheus service, you can monitor key metrics of TiDB Cloud from the endpoint easily.

This document describes how to configure your Prometheus service to read key metrics from the TiDB Cloud endpoint and how to view the metrics using Grafana.

Prerequisites

• To integrate TiDB Cloud with Prometheus, you must have a self-hosted or managed Prometheus service.

• To edit third-party integration settings of TiDB Cloud, you must have the Organization Owner access to your organization or Project Member access to the target project in TiDB Cloud.

Limitation

You cannot use the Prometheus and Grafana integration in Developer Tier.

Steps

Step 1. Get a scrape_config file for Prometheus

Before configuring your Prometheus service to read metrics of TiDB Cloud, you need to generate a scrape_config YAML file in TiDB Cloud first. The scrape_config file contains a unique bearer token that allows the Prometheus service to monitor any database clusters in the current project.

To get the scrape_config file for Prometheus, do the following:

1. On the TiDB Cloud console, choose a target project for Prometheus integration, and then click the Project Settings tab.

2. In the left pane, click Integrations.

3. Click Integration to Prometheus.

4. Click Add File to generate and show the scrape_config file for the current project.

5. Make a copy of the scrape_config file content for later use.

   Note

   For security reasons, TiDB Cloud only shows a newly generated scrape_config file once. Ensure that you copy the content before closing the file window. If you forget to do so, you need to delete the scrape_config file in TiDB Cloud and generate a new one. To delete a scrape_config file, select the file, click ..., and then click Delete.

Step 2. Integrate with Prometheus

1. In the monitoring directory specified by your Prometheus service, locate the Prometheus configuration file.

   For example, /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml.

2. In the Prometheus configuration file, locate the scrape_configs section, and then copy the scrape_config file content obtained from TiDB Cloud to the section.

3. In your Prometheus service, check Status > Targets to confirm that the new scrape_config file has been read. If not, you might need to restart the Prometheus service.

Step 3. Use Grafana GUI dashboards to visualize the metrics

After your Prometheus service is reading metrics from TiDB Cloud, you can use Grafana GUI dashboards to visualize the metrics.

For more information about how to use Grafana, see Grafana documentation.

Best practice of rotating scrape_config

To improve data security, it is a general best practice to periodically rotate scrape_config file bearer tokens.

1. Follow Step 1 to create a new scrape_config file for Prometheus.
2. Add the content of the new file to your Prometheus configuration file.
3. Once you have confirmed that your Prometheus service is still able to read from TiDB Cloud, remove the content of the old scrape_config file from your Prometheus configuration file.
4. On the Integration page of your project, delete the corresponding old scrape_config file to block anyone else from using it to read from the TiDB Cloud Prometheus endpoint.

Metrics available to Prometheus

Prometheus tracks the following metric data for your TiDB clusters.