promscale VS prometheus

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

WriteRequest::timeseries is a vector (https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/main/prompb/re...) and

Developers widely use Prometheus as a system for operational monitoring and alerting for their projects. Here is a list of tools for monitoring frontend services with Prometheus.

Just to give an example of the power of Go for CLI builds, you may have already used or at least heard of Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, but what do they all have in common? They all have a large part of their usability via CLI and are developed in Go 🐿.

Distributed system administrators need mechanisms and tools for monitoring individual nodes in order to analyze the system and promptly detect anomalies. Developers also need effective mechanisms for analyzing, diagnosing issues, and identifying bugs in protocol implementations. Logging, tracing, and collecting metrics are common observability techniques to allow monitoring and obtaining diagnostic information from the system; most of the explored code bases use these techniques. OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are popular open-source monitoring solutions, which are used in many of the explored code bases.

Setting up monitoring for a system, especially one involving GRPC communication, provides crucial visibility into its operations. In this guide, we walked through the steps to instrument both a GRPC server and client with Prometheus metrics, exposed those metrics via an HTTP endpoint, and visualized them using Grafana. The Docker-Compose setup simplified the deployment of both Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring a streamlined process.

Alerting and Notification: Select a tool with flexible alerting mechanisms to proactively detect anomalies or deviations from defined thresholds. Consider asking questions like "Does this tool offer customizable alerting options and support notification channels that suit our team's communication preferences?" A tool like Prometheus provides robust alerting capabilities.

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit. It is designed to monitor highly dynamic containerized systems, making it an excellent choice for monitoring Docker containers and Kubernetes clusters.

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.46.0/prometheus-2.46.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.