What is Grafana Mimir?

Question

Accepted Answer

**Mimir** — horizontally scalable metrics storage from Grafana Labs, compatible with Prometheus.

**Thanos vs Mimir:**
- **Thanos**: simpler, sidecar-based, good for multi-cluster.
- **Mimir**: more complex, but scales to billions of metrics, push-based (remote write).

**Mimir Architecture:**
- **Distributor** — accepts metrics (remote write).
- **Ingester** — writes to blocks.
- **Compactor** — compacts.
- **Querier** — serves PromQL queries.
- **Store-gateway** — reads from Object Storage.

**Prometheus remote write:**
```yaml
remote_write:
  - url: http://mimir-distributor.observability:8080/api/v1/push
    send_exemplars: true
    headers:
      X-Scope-OrgID: team-orders
```

**Multi-tenancy:** each tenant is isolated via X-Scope-OrgID header.

**Grafana datasource:**
```yaml
datasources:
  - name: Mimir
    type: prometheus
    url: http://mimir-query-frontend.observability:8080
    jsonData:
      httpHeaderName1: X-Scope-OrgID
    secureJsonData:
      httpHeaderValue1: team-orders
```

**Running (Microservices mode):** `mimir -target=all -config.file=mimir.yaml`.

**Ready Helm chart:** `grafana/mimir-distributed` chart.

DevOps: What is Grafana Mimir?