Temporal Monitoring Setup

Guidance for configuring monitoring, alerting, and observability for Temporal clusters.

Monitoring Stack

Recommended stack:

• Prometheus: Metrics collection
• Grafana: Visualization and dashboards
• Alertmanager: Alert routing and notifications

Metrics Overview

Temporal exposes Prometheus metrics on port 9090 for each service.

Key Metric Categories

Category	Prefix	Purpose
Service	temporal_*	Service health, latency
Persistence	temporal_persistence_*	Database operations
Workflow	temporal_workflow_*	Workflow execution
Activity	temporal_activity_*	Activity execution
Task Queue	temporal_task_*	Task dispatch

Prometheus Configuration

Scrape Configuration

# prometheus.yml
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'temporal-frontend'
    kubernetes_sd_configs:
      - role: pod
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_label_app_kubernetes_io_component]
        regex: frontend
        action: keep
      - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_port_number]
        regex: "9090"
        action: keep

  - job_name: 'temporal-history'
    kubernetes_sd_configs:
      - role: pod
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_label_app_kubernetes_io_component]
        regex: history
        action: keep

  - job_name: 'temporal-matching'
    kubernetes_sd_configs:
      - role: pod
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_label_app_kubernetes_io_component]
        regex: matching
        action: keep

  - job_name: 'temporal-worker'
    kubernetes_sd_configs:
      - role: pod
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_label_app_kubernetes_io_component]
        regex: worker
        action: keep

With Helm

Enable Prometheus in Helm values:

prometheus:
  enabled: true
  nodeExporter:
    enabled: false

server:
  metrics:
    prometheus:
      timerType: histogram

Essential Metrics

Service Health

# Frontend request rate
sum(rate(temporal_frontend_requests_total[5m])) by (operation)

# Frontend errors
sum(rate(temporal_frontend_errors_total[5m])) by (operation, error_type)

# Frontend latency p99
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(temporal_frontend_request_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, operation)
)

Persistence (Database)

# Persistence request rate
sum(rate(temporal_persistence_requests_total[5m])) by (operation)

# Persistence latency p99
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(temporal_persistence_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, operation)
)

# Persistence errors
sum(rate(temporal_persistence_errors_total[5m])) by (operation, error_type)

Workflow Execution

# Workflow start rate
sum(rate(temporal_workflow_started_total[5m])) by (namespace, workflow_type)

# Workflow completion rate
sum(rate(temporal_workflow_completed_total[5m])) by (namespace, workflow_type)

# Workflow failure rate
sum(rate(temporal_workflow_failed_total[5m])) by (namespace, workflow_type)

# Workflow execution latency
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(temporal_workflow_endtoend_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, workflow_type)
)

Task Queue Health

# Schedule-to-start latency (task wait time)
histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(temporal_schedule_to_start_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, task_queue)
)

# Task dispatch rate
sum(rate(temporal_task_dispatch_total[5m])) by (task_queue, task_type)

# Task backlog
temporal_task_queue_depth

Grafana Dashboards

Import Official Dashboards

Temporal provides official Grafana dashboards:

# Dashboard IDs for import
# Server Overview: 10270
# SDK Metrics: 10271

Custom Dashboard Panels

Service Health Panel:

{
  "title": "Frontend Request Rate",
  "type": "graph",
  "targets": [{
    "expr": "sum(rate(temporal_frontend_requests_total[5m])) by (operation)",
    "legendFormat": "{{operation}}"
  }]
}

Task Queue Latency Panel:

{
  "title": "Schedule-to-Start Latency (p99)",
  "type": "graph",
  "targets": [{
    "expr": "histogram_quantile(0.99, sum(rate(temporal_schedule_to_start_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, task_queue))",
    "legendFormat": "{{task_queue}}"
  }]
}

Alerting Rules

Critical Alerts

# prometheus-rules.yaml
groups:
  - name: temporal-critical
    rules:
      - alert: TemporalServiceDown
        expr: up{job=~"temporal-.*"} == 0
        for: 1m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Temporal service {{ $labels.job }} is down"

      - alert: TemporalPersistenceHighLatency
        expr: |
          histogram_quantile(0.99,
            sum(rate(temporal_persistence_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, operation)
          ) > 0.5
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Database latency p99 > 500ms for {{ $labels.operation }}"

      - alert: TemporalPersistenceErrors
        expr: |
          sum(rate(temporal_persistence_errors_total[5m])) by (operation) > 0.1
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Persistence errors detected for {{ $labels.operation }}"

Warning Alerts

  - name: temporal-warning
    rules:
      - alert: TemporalHighScheduleToStartLatency
        expr: |
          histogram_quantile(0.99,
            sum(rate(temporal_schedule_to_start_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, task_queue)
          ) > 10
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Task queue {{ $labels.task_queue }} has high latency"
          description: "Tasks are waiting >10s to start. Consider scaling workers."

      - alert: TemporalHighFrontendLatency
        expr: |
          histogram_quantile(0.99,
            sum(rate(temporal_frontend_request_latency_bucket[5m])) by (le, operation)
          ) > 1
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Frontend latency high for {{ $labels.operation }}"

      - alert: TemporalWorkflowFailureRate
        expr: |
          sum(rate(temporal_workflow_failed_total[5m])) /
          sum(rate(temporal_workflow_completed_total[5m])) > 0.05
        for: 10m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Workflow failure rate > 5%"

      - alert: TemporalTaskQueueBacklog
        expr: temporal_task_queue_depth > 1000
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Task queue {{ $labels.task_queue }} backlog > 1000"

Worker Metrics

Configure SDK metrics in your workers:

import (
    "go.temporal.io/sdk/client"
    "go.temporal.io/sdk/contrib/opentelemetry"
    "go.temporal.io/sdk/worker"

    "github.com/uber-go/tally/v4"
    "github.com/uber-go/tally/v4/prometheus"
)

func main() {
    // Create Prometheus reporter
    reporter := prometheus.NewReporter(prometheus.Options{})
    scope, closer := tally.NewRootScope(tally.ScopeOptions{
        Tags:           map[string]string{"service": "my-worker"},
        CachedReporter: reporter,
        Separator:      prometheus.DefaultSeparator,
    }, time.Second)
    defer closer.Close()

    // Create client with metrics
    c, _ := client.Dial(client.Options{
        MetricsHandler: sdktally.NewMetricsHandler(scope),
    })
    defer c.Close()

    // Create worker
    w := worker.New(c, "task-queue", worker.Options{})
    // ...
}

Key SDK Metrics

# Activity execution latency
temporal_activity_execution_latency_bucket

# Workflow task latency
temporal_workflow_task_execution_latency_bucket

# Worker task slots
temporal_worker_task_slots_available

Logging Configuration

Configure structured logging for correlation:

# Temporal server config
log:
  stdout: true
  level: info
  outputFile: ""

Include workflow/run IDs in worker logs:

func YourActivity(ctx context.Context, input Input) error {
    logger := activity.GetLogger(ctx)
    logger.Info("Processing",
        "workflowID", activity.GetInfo(ctx).WorkflowExecution.ID,
        "runID", activity.GetInfo(ctx).WorkflowExecution.RunID,
        "activityID", activity.GetInfo(ctx).ActivityID,
    )
    // ...
}

Health Checks

Liveness Probe

livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health
    port: 7233
  initialDelaySeconds: 30
  periodSeconds: 10

Readiness Probe

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health
    port: 7233
  initialDelaySeconds: 10
  periodSeconds: 5

Troubleshooting with Metrics

Symptom	Metrics to Check	Likely Cause
Slow workflows	schedule_to_start_latency	Need more workers
Workflow failures	workflow_failed_total	Check activity errors
API errors	frontend_errors_total	Auth, rate limits
DB issues	persistence_latency	Database performance

Additional Resources

Reference Files

For complete metric reference, consult:

• references/metrics-reference.md - Complete metric documentation
• references/dashboard-json.md - Grafana dashboard definitions