query Prometheus HTTP API by list of metrics

Question

I want to query prometheus with a list of metric names in a single curl request.

There is a way to do it?

Something like this -

curl 'localhost:9090/api/v1/labels?name=<list_of_metric_names>'

I expect response like this -

[{
  metric_name:"metric1",
  labels:["label1", "label2"]
 },
 {
  metric_name:"metric2",
  labels:[..]
 }]

Answer 1

Endpoint api/v1/labels returns a combined list of label names. If this is acceptable, you can pass selector like {__name__=~"metric1|metric2"} to get them.

---

If you need list grouped by metric, you might use endpoint api/v1/series. It returns the list of time series matching selector (basically all the possible labels for every selected metric).

For example, command

curl -g 'https://prometheus.demo.do.prometheus.io/api/v1/series?' \
  --data-urlencode 'match[]=up{job="alertmanager"}' \
  --data-urlencode 'match[]=node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="user"}'

will return following json

{
    "status":"success",
    "data":[
        {
            "__name__":"node_cpu_seconds_total",
            "cpu":"0",
            "env":"demo",
            "instance":"demo.do.prometheus.io:9100",
            "job":"node",
            "mode":"user"
        },
        {
            "__name__":"up",
            "env":"demo",
            "instance":"demo.do.prometheus.io:9093",
            "job":"alertmanager"
        }
    ]
}

Here, you'll receive all possible combinations of label values, and will need to aggregate them.