mimir VS prometheus-operator

It consists of 6 separate components to run, plus 4 additional optional components [1]. And I don't even count 5 additional caches [2]. How is that "simple and easy"?

[1] https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/references/architectur...

[2] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/9a52522a05f25d6d6bc2e8...

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.

I used the one in their tutorial.

Grafana Agent can collect and stream data via Prometheus remote write protocol. Then you can either use Prometheus or Mimir. to receive the data at a central location. It depends on how many millions of series you need to collect.

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.

Grafana Mimir - scalable storage for Prometheus

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.

The project repository for Prometheus-operator can be found here, The repo defines the CRDs and the controller. You can follow this documentation for the installation. which will require the creation of metrics exporters, node exporters, scrape configurations, etc.

Personally I use kubernetes, k3s is kind of lightweight, with the Prometheus operator.

https://k3s.io/

https://prometheus-operator.dev/

Kubernetes is not for everyone and is far from perfect but you already use Docker and you seem to seek many features offered by Kubernetes.

I see that the operator is a community-run project. Does anybody have any experience (positive or negative) on running the operator itself? I wonder if it is more for multi-tenant Prometheus. For single tenant Prometheus collection, I guess the big gain is abstracting scrape config into ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor resources? Is there anything else that this makes much better?

But in all honesty if you’re on k8s you’re probably best served by the Prometheus operator. It’ll give you all that and more, easily.

Try some monitoring.

It’s a common pattern [1] how else can users override the child objects you’re controller creates?

1 https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator/b...

The Prometheus operator is this one https://github.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator

At a minimum, you want to look at your metrics using the Prometheus Operator. You can write alerts for resource requests.

Prometheus Operator is an independent project from the Prometheus project. I know, it can lead to confusion. In the official README you can find short comparison. Basically, Prometheus Operator does what an operator should do - provides Kubernetes native deployment and management of Prometheus and related monitoring components like Grafana or Alert Manager.