How to delete a monthly partition from VictoriaMetrics vmstore nodes

Question

We are backfilling old data into our VictoriaMetrics and Grafana setup. But we might have messed up the data on a month. We want to delete a monthly partition from vmstore nodes and start again. Is this possible through the APIs?

Answer 1

Yep, you can do this via VictoriaMetrics Delete API /api/v1/admin/tsdb/delete_series. Note, that you can only delete All of the data and restore/backfill ones again.

See examples below:

Single-node VictoriaMetrics

curl -v http://localhost:8428/api/v1/admin/tsdb/delete_series -d 'match[]=your_metric_name_here'

Cluster version of VictoriaMetrics

curl -v http://<vmselect>:8481/delete/0/prometheus/api/v1/admin/tsdb/delete_series -d 'match[]=your_metric_name_here'

VictoriaMetrics documentation has a guide "How to delete or replace metrics in VictoriaMetrics" with more explanation and examples.

Answer 2

The easiest and the fastest way to remove a month-worth partition of data in VictoriaMetrics is to stop VictoriaMetrics (or a vmstorage in cluster version), then delete the YYYY_MM directory for the needed month under the <-storageDataPath>/data/{small,big} directories and then start VictoriaMetrics again. See more details about storage in VictoriaMetrics in these docs.