How to ingest metrics into Monitoring

To ingest your metrics into the Nebius AI Cloud Monitoring service, follow these steps:

If you want to ingest time series, prepare your data in the correct format.
Choose a way to ingest your metrics depending on the resource from which you collect them.
(Optional) Connect Grafana® to visualize your metrics.

Ingestion methods

Choose how to ingest your metrics into the Nebius AI Cloud Monitoring service based on the type of resource from which you want to collect metrics:

Managed Service for Kubernetes® cluster:
- Recommended: Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes
- Prometheus Operator
Prometheus instance
Vector instance

Prepare time series

One of the types of data you can ingest into Monitoring is a time series. A time series consists of ordered timestamp, number pairs and follows the Prometheus time series format. Each time series has a metric name and a set of labels (key-value pairs). For example, in device{operation="create"}, device is the metric name, and operation="create" is the label. If you change a label value, for example, from {operation="create"} to {operation="delete"}, it results in a different time series.

Monitoring supports time series with up to 28 labels. If this limit is exceeded, the time series is not stored, although the service still responds with OK.

To avoid data loss, keep your label sets compact and meaningful:

Avoid high-cardinality labels that use too many different values, such as usernames or emails.
Consider pre-aggregating metrics or using static identifiers where possible.

Connect Grafana to view your own metrics

This method only works for metrics that you ingest yourself. To visualize in Grafana metrics provided by Nebius AI Cloud, see Grafana.

After you ingest metrics from your resources to Monitoring, you can configure Grafana to view the metrics in it by using one of these ways:

Install Nebius application
Connect data source in Grafana

Install the Grafana solution by Nebius, an application for Managed Service for Kubernetes®. The application is configured to receive metrics.

If you do not have a service account for observability services, create one.
Make sure that the service account is in a group that has at least the editor role within your tenant; for example, the default editors group. You can check this in the Administration → IAM section of the web console. If the service account is not in the required group, click → Add to group, and select editors.
Issue a static key for the service account using the following command:
```
nebius iam static-key issue \
  --name <name_for_the_key> \
  --account-service-account-id <service_account_ID> \
  --service observability
```
Copy the value of the static key from the token parameter of the response. You will need it later in the configuration steps.
Make sure that you have Grafana available, in any of these ways:
- Install Grafana on your local machine.
- Create an account in Grafana Cloud.
Open Grafana in your browser.
In the side menu, select Connections → Data sources.
In the top right corner, click Add new data source.
Select Prometheus.
In the Prometheus configuration, enter the following settings:
- Connection → Prometheus server URL: https://read.monitoring.api.nebius.cloud/projects/<project_ID>/prometheus. Specify your project ID in the URL. You can get it on the Project settings page of the web console.
- Authentication → HTTP headers: click Add header and enter Authorization and the value of the static key that you got earlier.
Click Save and test. If Prometheus is connected successfully, you should see the “Successfully queried the Prometheus API” message.

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Observability in Nebius AI Cloud

​Ingestion methods

​Prepare time series

​Connect Grafana to view your own metrics

Ingestion methods

Prepare time series

Connect Grafana to view your own metrics