How a time-series-aware reverse proxy cache turns sluggish dashboards into instant ones, and shields your databases from the load.

Welcome to Trickster: Accelerating Time-Series Dashboards.

Trickster is an HTTP reverse proxy cache and dashboard query accelerator, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project. It sits between dashboards like Grafana and time-series databases such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, and ClickHouse, and it understands the data passing through it. Instead of fetching the same hundreds of data points over and over on every dashboard refresh, Trickster's delta proxy fetches only the few new points it lacks, merging them with what it already holds. This book follows that idea from the ground up: the dashboard problem Trickster was born to solve, how the delta proxy works, the time-series tricks of step normalization and fast forward, the general-purpose reverse proxy cache underneath it all, the pluggable cache backends from in-memory maps to Redis, the Application Load Balancer that fans requests across redundant databases, and finally how you configure, deploy, and operate Trickster in a real cloud-native stack.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — The Dashboard Problem
2. Chapter 2 — Delta Proxy Caching
3. Chapter 3 — Time-Series Awareness
4. Chapter 4 — The Reverse Proxy Cache
5. Chapter 5 — Cache Backends
6. Chapter 6 — The Application Load Balancer
7. Chapter 7 — Configuring and Operating Trickster
8. Chapter 8 — Trickster in Practice