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Grafana Mimir: from discovery to expertise

A complete course on Grafana Mimir: long-term storage, high availability and multi-tenancy for Prometheus metrics, from monolithic mode to a Kubernetes deployment.

8 chapters14 lessonsEN
At your pace, through practice.

By the end of this course you will be able to

  • Explain the Mimir architecture and the role of each component
  • Send metrics via remote_write and deduplicate HA Prometheus pairs
  • Configure object storage, retention, tenants and limits
  • Manage rules and alerts with mimirtool
  • Deploy Mimir on Kubernetes and monitor it

🎯 Level : Advanced👥 Who it is for : SREs, DevOps engineers and Prometheus operators who need to centralise and retain metrics at scale

LEARNING PATH

Course curriculum

0Course overview1 lesson
  1. Assessment quizQuiz · ⏱ 10 min
1Introduction and architecture1 lesson

The limits of Prometheus and the components of Mimir.

  1. Why Grafana Mimir?Article · ⏱ 6 min
2The write path3 lessons

Remote write, distributors, ingesters and HA deduplication.

  1. The write pathArticle · ⏱ 8 min
  2. Lab: Monolithic Mimir with MinIO, Prometheus and GrafanaHands-on lab · ⏱ 45 min · Level 2/5
  3. Lab: Deduplicate two highly available Prometheus serversHands-on lab · ⏱ 40 min · Level 3/5
3Reading and storage2 lessons

Queries, caches, compaction and retention.

  1. The read pathArticle · ⏱ 5 min
  2. Compactor, retention and object storageArticle · ⏱ 8 min
4Multi-tenancy and limits3 lessons

Isolate teams and protect the cluster.

  1. Multi-tenancy and limitsArticle · ⏱ 7 min
  2. Lab: Tenants, limits and runtime configurationHands-on lab · ⏱ 40 min · Level 3/5
  3. Lab: Rules and alerts with the ruler and mimirtoolHands-on lab · ⏱ 40 min · Level 3/5
5Rules and alerts1 lesson

Ruler, Alertmanager and mimirtool.

  1. Ruler, Alertmanager and mimirtoolArticle · ⏱ 9 min
6Deployment and operations2 lessons

Kubernetes, monitoring and troubleshooting.

  1. Deploying and operating Mimir on KubernetesArticle · ⏱ 8 min
  2. Final Lab: Mimir on Kubernetes with HelmHands-on lab · ⏱ 1 h · Level 4/5
7Best practices1 lesson

Recommended practices for running the product in production.

  1. Grafana Mimir best practicesArticle · ⏱ 4 min

LEARN BY DOING

Use cases & applications

Centralised multi-cluster metrics

A single PromQL API for every cluster and environment.

Low-cost long retention

Years of metrics in object storage.

Shared observability platform

Several teams isolated by tenant, each with its own limits.

Highly available collection

Two Prometheus servers per cluster, with no duplicates stored.

Recommended prerequisites

Prometheus: From Discovery to Expertise

What next?

Grafana: From Discovery to ExpertiseGrafana Pyroscope: from discovery to expertiseVictoriaMetrics: from discovery to expertise

Frequently asked questions

Does Mimir replace Prometheus?

No: Prometheus (or Alloy) keeps collecting the metrics; Mimir receives them via remote_write, stores them and serves them through the same PromQL API.

Mimir or Thanos?

Thanos is added on top of existing Prometheus servers (sidecar) and offers downsampling; Mimir centralises via remote_write and provides native multi-tenancy and limits. Both store TSDB blocks in object storage.

Do you need Kafka to use Mimir?

Not to get started: classic block storage works without it. Recent versions offer a Kafka-based ingestion architecture to decouple reads and writes at large scale.

Is Mimir free?

Yes, Mimir is open source (AGPLv3). Grafana Labs also offers a managed version (Grafana Cloud Metrics) and an enterprise edition.