Prometheus doesn't have an explicit boolean type or functionality. However there is a convention and enough power in PromQL to work with booleans.

By convention in Prometheus, boolean metrics have either the value 0 for false or 1 for true. The most well known example is up , but there are others like the blackbox exporter's probe_success .

Alerting on these is quite common and easy, for example:

groups: - name: test.rules rules: - alert: InstanceDown expr: up{job="node"} == 0 for: 10m

This will alert for each node which is down, and thus has an up of 0.

Sometimes you want to do something more sophisticated, and the standard boolean algebra operators are needed.

How about checking if at least one node is up? max by (job)(up) will return 1 if at least one value is 1, and 0 otherwise. max behaves as an OR operator.

Similarly for checking if all nodes are up, min by (job)(up) will return 0 if at least one value is 0, and 1 otherwise. min behaves as an AND operator.

We have AND and OR, what about NOT? 1 - up will return the negation, as 1 - 0 = 1 and 1 - 1 = 0.

With AND, OR, and NOT we can build NAND and NOR, from upon all other boolean operators can be built.

We can do a little better for XOR, though there's two interpretations of how to deal with more than two inputs. If you mean the multi-input XOR where exactly one input must be true, then sum by (job)(up) == bool 1 will provide that. For the multi-input XOR where an odd number of inputs must be true, then sum by (job)(up) % 2 == bool 1 .

These take advantage of the bool modifier on comparisons. Usually a comparison in PromQL will filter results, returning only the ones that match. With bool instead you get a 0 or 1 result for every set of operands, indicating if they matched.

This can be used in a variety of ways. NOT could also be implemented as up == bool 0 . If you wanted a boolean indicating if at least 3 nodes were up you could use sum by (job)(up) >= bool 3 .

These examples are all within one metric. What if we want to do boolean algebra between two metrics a and b ? AND is a * b , OR is a + b > bool 0 , and XOR is a + b == bool 1 .

As PromQL supports floating point numbers, we can also do math that would be tricky with booleans alone. For example we can use avg to calculate the ratio of up nodes, and alert if too high a proportion are down:

groups: - name: test.rules rules: - alert: InstancesDown expr: avg(up{job="node"}) BY (job) < 0.75 for: 10m

None of the behaviour above was added to PromQL with booleans in mind, rather it is taking advantage of the richness of PromQL combined with a little bit of computer science knowledge.

It's not often that you'll need full boolean algebra, but you can be confident that it'll be possible when it does come up.

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