promscale VS Logflare

Now that Promscale has been deprecated, what are the other ideal means of self-hosted long term Prometheus storage?

Oh wow, I browsed the project just a few weeks ago, didn't see it then. I see the deprecation is recent (https://github.com/timescale/promscale/issues/1836)

They say:

> if you want to have a seamless experience between metrics and traces, then current experience of stitching together Prometheus & Jaeger is not great.

But I wonder if using Promscale https://github.com/timescale/promscale would make Prometheus & Jaeger not such a big problem as SigNoz imply.

Promscale readme:

> Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.

Either way, SigNoz seems interesting indeed. And am glad to see that SigNoz supports OpenTelemetry.

Hi! So the team is over 100 at this point, but engineering effort is spread across multiple products at this point.

The core timescaledb repo [0] has 10-15 primary engineers (although we are aggressively hiring for database internal engineers), with a few others working on DB hyperfunctions and our function pipelining [1] in a separate extension [2]. I think generally the set of folks who contribute to low-level database internals in C is just smaller than other type of projects.

We also have our promscale product [3], which is our observability backend powered by SQL & TimescaleDB.

And then there is Timescale Cloud, which is obviously a large engineering effort (most of which does not happen in public repos).

And we are hiring. Fully remote & global.

https://www.timescale.com/careers

[0] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

[1] https://www.timescale.com/blog/function-pipelines-building-f...

[2] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-toolkit

[3] https://github.com/timescale/promscale ; https://github.com/timescale/tobs

Promscale is a connector for Prometheus, one of the leading open-source monitoring solutions. Promscale is developed by Timescale, a time series database with full compatibility to Postgres. Since logs are time series events, Timescale developed Promscale to ingest events from Prometheus and make them available in SQL. You can install Promscale in numerous ways.

In case it helps, Promscale (from Timescale) offers long-term storage for Prometheus data and supports both PromQL and SQL queries. Here's the project page: https://www.timescale.com/promscale/ and the repo is here https://github.com/timescale/promscale It also support OpenTelemetry tracing if that's of interest.

At first, let's give the definition of `time series`. This is a series of (timestamp, value) pairs ordered by timestamp. The `value` may contain arbitrary data - a floating-point value, a text, a json, a data structure with many columns, etc. Each time series is uniquely identified by its name plus an optional set of {label="value"} labels. For example, temperature{city="London",country="UK"} or log_stream{host="foobar",datacenter="abc",app="nginx"}.

ClickHouse is perfectly optimized for storing and querying of such time series, including metrics. That's true that ClickHouse isn't optimized for handling millions of tiny inserts per second. It prefers infrequent batches with big number of rows per each batch. But this isn't the real problem in practice, because:

1) ClickHouse provides Buffer table engine for frequent inserts.

2) It is easy to create a special proxy app or library for data buffering before sending it to ClickHouse.

TimescaleDB provides Promscale [1] - a service, which allows using TimescaleDB as a storage backend for Prometheus. Unfortunately, it doesn't show outstanding performance comparing to Prometheus itself and to other remote storage solutions for Prometheus. Promscale requires more disk space, disk IO, CPU and RAM according to production tests [2], [3].

[1] https://github.com/timescale/promscale

[2] https://abiosgaming.com/press/high-cardinality-aggregations/

[3] https://valyala.medium.com/promscale-vs-victoriametrics-reso...

Full disclosure: I'm CTO at VictoriaMetrics - competing solution for TimescaleDB. VictoriaMetrics is built on top of architecture ideas from ClickHouse.

Promscale + TimescaleDB

btw recently cleaned up my wal cache busting code quite a bit if you're interested.

https://github.com/Logflare/logflare/blob/main/lib/logflare/...

Need to make a lib out of this!!

hey hn, supabase ceo here

the Val Town team were kind enough to share this article with me before they released it. Perhaps you know from previous HN threads that we take customer feedback very seriously. Hearing feedback like this is hard. Clearly the team at Val Town wanted Supabase to be great and we didn’t meet their expectations. For me personally, that hurts. A few quick comments

1. Modifying the database in production: I’ve published a doc on Maturity Models[0]. Hopefully this makes it clear that developers should be using Migrations once their project is live (not using the Dashboard to modify their database live). It also highlights the options for managing dev/local environments. This is just a start. We’re building Preview Databases into the native workflow so that developers don’t need to think about this.

2. Designing for Supabase: Our goal is to make all of Postgres easy, not obligatory. I’ve added a paragraph[1] in the first page in our Docs highlighting that it’s not always a good idea to go all-in on Postgres. We’ll add examples to our docs with “traditional” approaches like Node + Supabase, Rails + Supabase, etc. There are a lot of companies using this approach already, but our docs are overly focused on “the Supabase way” of doing things. There shouldn’t be a reason to switch from Supabase to any other Postgres provider if you want “plain Postgres”.

3. That said, we also want to continue making “all of Postgres” easy to use. We’re committed to building an amazing CLI experience. Like any tech, we’re going to need a few iterations. W’re building tooling for debugging and observability. We have index advisors coming[2]. We recently added Open Telemetry to Logflare[3] and added logging for local development[4]. We’re making platform usage incredibly clear[5]. We aim to make your database indestructible - we care about resilience as much as experience and we’ll make sure we highlight that in future product announcements.

I’ll finish with something that I think we did well: migrating away from Supabase was easy for Val Town, because it’s just Postgres. This is one of our core principles, “everything is portable” (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...). Portability forces us compete on experience. We aim to be the best Postgres hosting service in the world, and we’ll continue to focus on that goal even if we’re not there yet.

[0] Maturity models: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/maturity-model

[1] Choose your comfort level: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...

[2] Index advisor: https://database.dev/olirice/index_advisor

[3] Open Telemetry: https://github.com/Logflare/logflare/pull/1466

[4] Local logging: https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-logs-self-hosted

[5] Usage: https://twitter.com/kiwicopple/status/1658683758718124032?s=...

https://logflare.app/ is awesome, pipes into BiqQuery and is really easy to use and WAY cheaper than logpush. Depending on the amount of traffic, it's only a few dollars a month.

hey hn, supabase ceo here

this one is a long-time coming and it's a continuation of our acquisition of Logflare[0]. Since the acquisition we've be open-source-ing the server, which you can find here: https://github.com/Logflare/logflare

Logflare handles about 1.5 billion log-events everyday on supabase. It's built with Elixir and has no problems with that workload.

This is really just the start of the Logflare updates. All logs are currently ingested into BigQuery, and we are adding support for Clickhouse and other OLAP backends. Over time this will function very much like an open source Sentry alternative, where you can ingest data from various sources.

The team will be around if you have any questions about the technical implementation

[0] acquision: https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-acquires-logflare

Logflare was available under a BSL license prior to joining Supabase. We’ve since changed the license to Apache 2.0, aligning it with our open source philosophy.

https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/logflare https://logflare.app/

Logflare, now a part of Supabase, aims to streamline the logging experience for Cloudflare-, Elixir-, and Vercel-based applications. However, it can be adapted to support any type of log. Logflare provides structured logging ability without limits or added latency. It aims to provide the best performance with minimal overhead when processing logs for supported application platforms.