VictoriaMetrics/docs/guides/guide-vmcluster-multiple-retention-setup.md

Multi Retention Setup within VictoriaMetrics Cluster

Objective

Setup Victoria Metrics Cluster with support of multiple retention periods within one installation.

Challenge

If you use VictoriaMetrics enterprise, then you can use retention filters for applying multiple retentions to distinct sets of time series and/or tenants.

Community version of VictoriaMetrics supports only one retention period via -retentionPeriod command-line flag. The following solution allows supporting multiple retentions for community version of VictoriaMetrics.

Solution

A multi-retention setup can be implemented by dividing a victoriametrics cluster into logical groups with different retentions.

Example: Setup should handle 3 different retention groups 3months, 1year and 3 years. Solution contains 3 groups of vmstorages + vminserst and one group of vmselects. Routing is done by vmagent and relabeling configuration. The -retentionPeriod sets how long to keep the metrics.

The diagram below shows a proposed solution

Implementation Details

1. Groups of vminserts A know about only vmstorages A and this is explicitly specified via -storageNode configuration.
2. Groups of vminserts B know about only vmstorages B and this is explicitly specified via -storageNode configuration.
3. Groups of vminserts C know about only vmstorages A and this is explicitly specified via -storageNode configuration.
4. Vmselect reads data from all vmstorage nodes via -storageNode configuration.
5. Vmagent routes incoming metrics to the given set of vminsert nodes using relabeling rules specified at -remoteWrite.urlRelabelConfig configuration.

Multi-Tenant Setup

Every group of vmstorages can handle one tenant or multiple one. Different groups can have overlapping tenants. As vmselect reads from all vmstorage nodes, the data is aggregated on its level.

Additional Enhancements

You can set up vmauth for routing data to the given vminsert group depending on the needed retention.