Increasing Prometheus storage retention

There's the --storage.tsdb.retention.time flag that you can set when you start Prometheus. It defines how long data is kept in the time-series database (TSDB). The default is 15 days.

So, to increase the retention time to a year, you should be able to set this to something like:

--storage.tsdb.retention.time=1y
# or
--storage.tsdb.retention.time=365d

See the Prometheus documentation.


  1. Edit the prometheus.service file

vi /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service

  1. add "--storage.tsdb.retention.time=1y" below to "ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus \" line.

So the config will look like bellow for 1 year of data retention.

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus \
    --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    --storage.tsdb.path /var/lib/prometheus/ \
    --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles \
    --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries \
    --web.external-url=http://34.89.26.156:9090 \
    --storage.tsdb.retention.time=1y
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Tags:

Monitoring

Prometheus

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