Prometheus many-to-many problem for kube cronjobs - kubernetes

Question

Hy there,
I'm trying to configure Kubernetes Cronjobs monitoring & alerts with Prometheus. I found this helpful guide
But I always get a many-to-many matching not allowed: matching labels must be unique on one side error.
For example, this is the PromQL query which triggers this error:
max(
kube_job_status_start_time
* ON(job_name) GROUP_RIGHT()
kube_job_labels{label_cronjob!=""}
) BY (job_name, label_cronjob)
The queries by itself result in e.g. these metrics
kube_job_status_start_time:
kube_job_status_start_time{app="kube-state-metrics",chart="kube-state-metrics-0.12.1",heritage="Tiller",instance="REDACTED",job="kubernetes-service-endpoints",job_name="test-1546295400",kubernetes_name="kube-state-metrics",kubernetes_namespace="monitoring",kubernetes_node="REDACTED",namespace="test-develop",release="kube-state-metrics"}
kube_job_labels{label_cronjob!=""}:
kube_job_labels{app="kube-state-metrics",chart="kube-state-metrics-0.12.1",heritage="Tiller",instance="REDACTED",job="kubernetes-service-endpoints",job_name="test-1546295400",kubernetes_name="kube-state-metrics",kubernetes_namespace="monitoring",kubernetes_node="REDACTED",label_cronjob="test",label_environment="test-develop",namespace="test-develop",release="kube-state-metrics"}
Is there something I'm missing here? The same many-to-many error happens for every query I tried from the guide.
Even constructing it by myself from ground up resulted in the same error.
Hope you can help me out here :)

Answer 1

In my case I don't get this extra label from Prometheus when installed via helm (stable/prometheus-operator).
You need to configure it in Prometheus. It calls: honor_labels: false
# If honor_labels is set to "false", label conflicts are resolved by renaming
# conflicting labels in the scraped data to "exported_<original-label>" (for
# example "exported_instance", "exported_job") and then attaching server-side
# labels.
So you have to configure your prometheus.yaml file - config with option honor_labels: false
# Setting honor_labels to "true" is useful for use cases such as federation and
# scraping the Pushgateway, where all labels specified in the target should be
# preserved
Anyway if I have it like this (I have now exported_jobs), still can't do proper query, but I guess is still because of my LHS.
Error executing query: found duplicate series for the match group
{exported_job="kube-state-metrics"} on the left hand-side of the operation:
[{__name__=

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue when I followed that article, but for me, I actually get duplicate job names but in different namespaces.
Ex. When running kube_job_status_start_time:
kube_job_status_start_time{instance="REDACTED",job="kube-state-metrics",job_name="job-abc-123",namespace="us"}
kube_job_status_start_time{instance="REDACTED",job="kube-state-metrics",job_name="job-abc-123",namespace="ca"}
So I had to either add a filter for the namespace or add namespace into the ON/BY clauses to get it to be unique.
e.g. for one of the subqueries I had to do this:
max(
kube_job_status_start_time
* ON(namespace, job_name) GROUP_RIGHT()
kube_job_labels{label_cronjob!=""}
) BY (namespace, label_cronjob)
Essentially had to apply that principle to all the rest of the queries for it to work for me. Not sure if that applies in your case.

Answer 3

Replacing kube_job_status_start_time with max(kube_job_status_start_time) by (job_name) will aggregate out any duplicates and should resolve the error.
The resulting query will look like this
max(
max(kube_job_status_start_time) by (job_name)
* ON(job_name) GROUP_RIGHT()
kube_job_labels{label_cronjob!=""}
) BY (job_name, label_cronjob)

Answer 4

I dug into this issue a bit more, and I guess the root cause of it is within this one-to-many vector matching expression:
kube_job_status_start_time * ON(job_name) GROUP_RIGHT() kube_job_labels{label_cronjob!=""}
where the group modifier "GROUP_RIGHT()" suggests, that each vector element from the left side (kube_job_status_start_time) can match with multiple elements on the right side (kube_job_labels), based on common label (job_name). The thing is that we are really dealing here with many-to-many matching, as each vector element from right side can match also multiple elements from left vector as well:
I think that what we are missing here is the way to uniquely identify exported Job objects from K8S by Prometheus. The author of this blog post, mentions about this feature in his setup:
...Prometheus resolves this collision of label names by including the
raw metric’s label as an exported_job label...
In my case I don't get this extra label from Prometheus when installed via helm (stable/prometheus-operator).

Answer 5

Regarding the missing labels - make sure that your kube-state-metrics is configured with a --metric-labels-allowlist. This is "new" since kube-state-metrics v2. See https://kubernetes.io/blog/2021/04/13/kube-state-metrics-v-2-0/#what-is-new-in-v2-0
By default, the metric contains only name and namespace labels.
But... the original guide is not woking with newer kube-state-metrics anyway. I can recommend this guide, which is a rework and does not need the labels.