Why is Promdump not suitable for production environments?

[TijmenvanGroezen]

I'm looking for way to export data from a Prometheus database and found Promdump as an option. I'm only wondering what the reason behind the statement on the github page is that the application is not suitable for production environments? What are the reasons behind this statement?

[ihcsim]

I want to make sure that people don't think this is a tool for backing up and restoring Prometheus in production. In addition to the limitations and some of the post-import manual steps, the export is done on a live volume, where Prometheus can change the data while the export is happening.

[TijmenvanGroezen]

So could you say it is safe to backup data from a live system, but restoring the data may raise issues in production? Or could the backup also raise issues in a live system?

[ihcsim]

Backup is fine. It's read-only, so it won't mess up your Prometheus.

Restore works most of the time. On OpenShift, you might get this error on the restored Prometheus:

opening storage failed: get segment range: segments are not sequential

The FAQ shows how to get around it.

Also, keep in mind that pre-restore, promdump will wipe the existing data on the target Prometheus. So make sure there isn't something there that you will like to retain.