Merge pull request #24 from prometheus/roadmap

Add roadmap documentation.

content/docs/introduction/roadmap.md

+---
+title: Roadmap
+sort_rank: 6
+---
+
+# Roadmap
+
+The following is only a selection of some of the major features we plan to
+implement in the near future. To get a more complete overview of planned
+features and current work, see the issue trackers for the various repositories,
+for example, the [Prometheus
+server](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues).
+
+**Hierarchical federation**
+
+Hierarchical federation will allow higher-level Prometheus servers to collect
+aggregated time series data from subordinated servers. This will enable more
+scalable monitoring topologies. For example, a setup might consist of
+per-datacenter Prometheus servers that collect data in high detail, and a set
+of global Prometheus servers which collect and store only aggregated data from
+those local servers. This allows you to have an aggregate global view and
+detailed local views.
+
+GitHub issue: [#480](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/480)
+
+**Aggregatable histograms**
+
+The current client-side [summary
+types](http://localhost:3000/docs/concepts/metric_types/#summaries) do not
+support aggregation of quantiles. For example, it is [statistically
+incorrect](http://latencytipoftheday.blogspot.de/2014/06/latencytipoftheday-you-cant-average.html)
+to average over the 90th percentile latency of multiple monitored instances.
+We plan to implement server-side histograms which will allow for this use case.
+
+GitHub issue: [#9](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/9)
+
+**More flexible label matching in binary operations**
+
+[Binary operations](/docs/querying/operators/) between time series vectors
+currently require exact matches of label sets on both sides of the operation
+in order for paired vector elements to propagate into the result. We plan to
+add more flexible label-matching features to support advanced query use cases.
+This applies to 1-to-1 element matches as well as for 1-to-n matches.
+
+GitHub issues: [#488](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/488) and [#393](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/393)
+
+**Support for more types of service discovery**
+
+Currently Prometheus supports configuring static HTTP targets, as well as
+discovering targets dynamically via [DNS SRV
+records](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record). We plan to support more
+types of service discovery (e.g. Consul or Zookeeper) in the future. Some will
+be implemented natively, but we may also add a plugin system for arbitrary
+discovery mechanisms.
+
+**Restartless configuration changes**
+
+Currently Prometheus requires a restart after any configuration or rule file
+change. This can mean monitoring interruptions for short periods of time. In
+the future, we want to support reloading configuration changes without having
+to restart Prometheus.
+
+GitHub issue: [#108](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/108)
+
+**Long-term storage**
+
+Currently Prometheus has support for storing samples on local disk, as well as
+experimental support for writing data into OpenTSDB. We plan to improve
+long-term storage support, although the details are not determined yet. This
+might include read-back support from OpenTSDB in Prometheus, or support for
+other long-term storage backends.
+
+GitHub issue: [#10](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/10)
+
+**Server-side metric metadata support**
+
+At this time, metric types and other metadata are only used in the client
+libaries and in the exposition format, but not persisted or utilized in the
+Prometheus server. We plan on making use of this metadata in the future. For
+example, we could suggest automatic rates over counters, warn users if they
+take the rate of a gauge, or display metric documentation strings. The details
+of this are still to be determined.