Prometheus Pushgateway
HTTP gateway that accepts pushed metrics from short-lived jobs and exposes them for Prometheus scraping, bridging ephemeral workloads with pull-based monitoring.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
No built-in auth or TLS — these must be provided by a reverse proxy. The admin API (DELETE, /api/v1/admin/wipe) is especially sensitive and should be firewalled.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You have short-lived batch jobs or cron tasks whose metrics would be lost between Prometheus scrape cycles.
Avoid When
Your workloads are long-lived services or you need per-pod/per-instance metric isolation at scale.
Use Cases
- • Agent pushes completion metrics (duration, exit code, records processed) from a cron job to Pushgateway after each run
- • Agent instruments a one-shot batch pipeline and pushes job-level counters before the container exits
- • Agent uses Pushgateway as a dead-man's switch — alert fires if a metric is not refreshed within a time window
- • Agent collects metrics from serverless functions that cannot be scraped directly and routes them through Pushgateway
- • Agent validates Pushgateway metric presence via its REST API to confirm a batch job completed successfully
Not For
- • Long-running services — those should expose a /metrics endpoint for direct Prometheus scraping
- • High-cardinality or per-instance metrics from horizontally scaled services (metrics collide under shared job labels)
- • Log aggregation, tracing, or any non-numeric time-series data
Interface
Authentication
No built-in authentication. TLS and basic auth can be added via a reverse proxy. Expose only on internal networks.
Pricing
Fully open source; self-hosted with no commercial component.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Metrics from different job instances share the same label namespace — multiple workers pushing to the same job/instance label will overwrite each other
- ⚠ Pushgateway does not timestamp metrics on push; Prometheus assigns the scrape time, which can make batch job timing look misleading
- ⚠ Stale metrics persist indefinitely until explicitly deleted or Pushgateway restarts — agents must DELETE after successful job completion
- ⚠ The grouping key (job + label pairs) in the URL path must be consistent between push and delete or metrics will accumulate
- ⚠ No authentication by default means any process on the network can overwrite or delete metrics
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.