kiali VS thanos

Kiali: The Istio service mesh console. You’ll be able to monitor and check traffic flows, configure rich rules, circuit breakers, load balancers, and more.

We can use tools like Grafana, Prometheus, Kiali and Zipkin for monitoring and observability as they work well with the telemetry provided by Istio. You can use these or use your existing monitoring stack as well.

Jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform Kiali - Kiali project, observability for the Istio service mesh ELK - Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana fluentbit - Fast and Lightweight Log processor and forwarder for Linux, BSD and OSX Loki - Like Prometheus, but for logs

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

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.

Long term storage all depends on your needs and sophistication. I use Thanos for our system since it has an extremely flexible scaling system. But there is also Grafana Mimir. They're both similar in that they use Prometheus TSDB format as part of the underlying storage. One nice Thanos advantage is that it does do downsampling in addition to being able to store raw metric data for a long time. It will auto-select downsampled data to make requests faster.

You can aggregate all your clusters Prometheus metrics together with a wonderful tool called Thanos. This will allow you to use just a single Grafana instance against Thanos and using a label select which cluster you wish to see metrics from. The downside of this, is that none of the Grafana dashboards from the internet will work as-is. You'll need to customize all of them for Thanos support. The other downside is, you have a single point of failure, and (see next item) you can't customize who can access what in regards to your dev vs production data/metrics/access.

Depending on how you want to set things up, you can use Thanos or Mimir to create the single-pane-of-glass view of your data.

You could look at something like Thanos and store your data in S3: https://thanos.io/