Accessing Rally benchmark results

Rally can persist every race to a dedicated Elasticsearch metrics store (set datastore.type = elasticsearch in the [reporting] section of ~/.rally/rally.ini; see docs/configuration.rst). This skill covers reading that data back — overall results, trends across runs, comparisons, and convergence checks.

The metrics store is a separate cluster from the one under test. Point queries at the metrics store host from [reporting], never at the benchmark target.

Check for an existing report first. If the race was launched via the running-benchmarks skill with --report-file (e.g. ~/benchmarks/result.md), the summary report for that single race is already saved on disk — read that file instead of re-querying. Use this skill's queries for anything the saved report doesn't cover: trends across runs, comparisons, convergence, or ad-hoc aggregations.

When to use

• Browsing past races for a track or time range.
• Getting one race's overall per-task results (throughput, latency, service_time).
• Charting how a metric moved across runs (regression / improvement detection).
• Comparing two specific races to quantify a change.
• Checking whether a run's metrics stabilized (converged) over its duration.

Where the data lives

By default (datastore.use_data_streams = true) Rally writes to three data streams; rally-races-v1, rally-results-v1, and rally-metrics-v1 (detailed below). If you set datastore.use_data_streams = false, Rally writes to monthly indices instead (rally-races-YYYY-MM, rally-results-YYYY-MM, rally-metrics-YYYY-MM). Querying with a wildcard (rally-races-*, rally-results-*, rally-metrics-*) covers both layouts.

Key fields (docs/metrics.rst)

race-id (UUID grouping a run), race-timestamp, @timestamp (epoch ms per sample), relative-time (ms since race start), track, challenge, car, environment, sample-type (normal = measured samples, warmup = warmup-phase samples), name (metric name, e.g. service_time), value, unit, task, operation, operation-type, and meta.* (host/CPU/OS info, source_revision, distribution_version, and user tags stored as meta.tag_<key>).

Metric direction: for latency, service_time, processing_time, and GC time, lower is better; for throughput, higher is better.

Prefer the built-in commands

Two operations need no query — Rally reads the configured datastore directly:

# List past races (filter by track and/or user tags); note the race-ids.
esrally list races --track=pmc --user-tags="intention:baseline-8.x"

# Quantify the difference between two races.
esrally compare --baseline=<race-id> --contender=<race-id>

See docs/tournament.rst. Reach for direct queries below when you need trends, aggregations, or fields these commands don't expose.

Direct queries

Run these against the metrics store cluster with any Elasticsearch client, curl, or Kibana Dev Tools. Build complex request bodies programmatically (e.g. a Python dict + json.dumps) rather than hand-writing nested heredocs.

List recent races for a track

GET rally-races-*/_search
{ "size": 20, "sort": [{"race-timestamp": "desc"}],
  "query": {"bool": {"filter": [{"term": {"track": "pmc"}}]}} }

Get one race's overall results (per task)

Task and operation names are track-specific — discover them with esrally info --track=<track>. Omit the task filter to return every task.

GET rally-results-*/_search
{ "size": 200,
  "query": {"bool": {"filter": [
    {"term": {"race-id": "<uuid>"}},
    {"term": {"task": "<task>"}}
  ]}} }

Trend of a metric across runs

One row per race; expand size/range as needed.

GET rally-metrics-*/_search
{ "size": 0,
  "query": {"bool": {"filter": [
    {"term": {"track": "geonames"}},
    {"term": {"task": "<task>"}},
    {"term": {"name": "service_time"}},
    {"term": {"sample-type": "normal"}},
    {"range": {"@timestamp": {"gte": "now-30d"}}}
  ]}},
  "aggs": {"by_race": {
    "terms": {"field": "race-id", "size": 100, "order": {"ts": "asc"}},
    "aggs": {
      "ts": {"min": {"field": "@timestamp"}},
      "pcts": {"percentiles": {"field": "value", "percents": [50, 90, 99]}}
    }}} }

Compare two races by query

When you want more than esrally compare shows, pull each race's per-task stats and diff them client-side. For latency/service_time a positive delta is a regression; for throughput a negative delta is a regression.

GET rally-metrics-*/_search
{ "size": 0,
  "query": {"bool": {"filter": [
    {"terms": {"race-id": ["<baseline-uuid>", "<contender-uuid>"]}},
    {"term": {"name": "service_time"}},
    {"term": {"sample-type": "normal"}}
  ]}},
  "aggs": {"by_race": {"terms": {"field": "race-id", "size": 2},
    "aggs": {"by_task": {"terms": {"field": "task", "size": 100},
      "aggs": {"pcts": {"percentiles": {"field": "value", "percents": [50, 90, 99]}}}}}}} }

Convergence / stability check

Use this to check whether a race reached steady state before you trust its numbers. The query splits one task's service_time samples into up to ~60 time buckets and reports p50/p90/p99 for each. If those percentiles level off toward the end of the run, the workload converged and the results are stable; if they keep drifting, the numbers are unreliable — rerun with a longer warmup or more iterations.

GET rally-metrics-*/_search
{ "size": 0,
  "query": {"bool": {"filter": [
    {"term": {"race-id": "<uuid>"}},
    {"term": {"name": "service_time"}},
    {"term": {"task": "<task>"}}
  ]}},
  "aggs": {"over_time": {
    "auto_date_histogram": {"field": "@timestamp", "buckets": 60},
    "aggs": {"pcts": {"percentiles": {"field": "value", "percents": [50, 90, 99]}}}
  }} }

Filter by a user tag

Tags passed via --user-tags are stored under meta.tag_<key>. Add to any filter:

{"term": {"meta.tag_intention": "baseline-8.x"}}

Notes

• Exclude warmup with {"term": {"sample-type": "normal"}} for reported metrics — unless you specifically want to study cold-start behaviour, in which case keep the warmup samples.
• task is unique per invocation of an operation; operation may repeat. task/operation are only set on latency/throughput/service_time samples.
• Node-level metrics (GC, segments, store size) are only present when Rally provisioned the cluster or the node-stats telemetry device was enabled (docs/telemetry.rst).