cortex VS thanos

Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant prometheus alternative.

There are many Projects like Thanos, M3, Cortex, and Victoriametrics. But Thanos is the most popular among these. Thanos addresses these issues with Prometheus and is the ideal solution for scaling Prometheus in environments with extensive metrics or multiple clusters where we require a global view of historical metrics. In this blog, we will explore the components of Thanos and will try to simplify its architecture by building it step by step, starting with the main components. We will also have a demo using k6-metrics. Before diving into Thanos, I recommend reading our blog on Prometheus Monitoring with Prometheus if you are not already familiar with Prometheus.

now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool

Yes, but also no. The Prometheus ecosystem already has two FOSS time-series databases that are complementary to Prometheus itself. Thanos and Mimir. Not to mention M3db, developed at Uber, and Cortex, then ancestor of Mimir. There's a bunch of others I won't mention as it would take too long.

You can use the Remote write feature to send to a centralized location. It would have to be scalable like Cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/

Cortex is not really good for high-cardinality metrics (if you are talking about https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex)

For a homelab I think prometheus + grafana is easy to get started and scales well. There are lots of ways to set up the architecture. Prometheus can write to a directory on a filesystem, it can be set to write to a remote server, and there are other projects to integrate object storage (s3, minio, etc) or influxdb for long term storage and downsampling.

Cortex (it is renamed to Mimir recently).

Thanos is a set of components that can be added to an existing Prometheus deployment to enable long-term storage and global query view.

Started in November 2017, Thanos is an open-source CNCF incubating project with over 12.8k stars on GitHub. Built on top of Prometheus, Thanos aims to provide a highly available Prometheus environment with long-term storage support and a global view of metrics. Companies like Disney, Abode, eBay, SoundCloud, and ByteDance use Thanos for monitoring at scale. However, setting up Thanos can be complex and requires expertise with Prometheus and industry experience. If you want to overcome the limitations of Prometheus and set up Thanos for monitoring but don't know where to start, CloudRaft offers enterprise-grade consulting and support for Thanos that you should check out. Now, let's delve into the components of Thanos and understand its complete architecture.

The open source projects Fastly uses and the foundations we partner with are vital to Fastly’s mission and success. Here's an unscientific list of projects and organizations supported by the Linux Foundation that we use and love include: The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, containerd, eBPF, Falco, OpenAPI Initiative, ESLint, Express, Fastify, Lodash, Mocha, Node.js, Prometheus, Jenkins, OpenTelemetry, Envoy, etcd, Helm, osquery, Harbor, sigstore, cert-manager, Cilium, Fluentd, Keycloak, Open Policy Agent, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority (C2PA), Flux, gRPC, Strimzi, Thanos, Linkerd, Let’s Encrypt, WebAssembly. And the list goes on!

Monitoring = netdata on each RPi https://www.netdata.cloud/ binded to the vpn interface being scraped into a prometeus thaons https://thanos.io/ setup with grafana to give management the Green all is good screens (very important).

Sounds like you want something like Thanos