promscale VS TimescaleDB

Compare promscale vs TimescaleDB and see what are their differences.

promscale

[DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB. (by timescale)

TimescaleDB

An open-source time-series SQL database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries. Packaged as a PostgreSQL extension. (by timescale)
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promscale TimescaleDB
18 82
1,330 16,294
-0.2% 1.5%
0.0 9.8
1 day ago 6 days ago
Go C
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

promscale

Posts with mentions or reviews of promscale. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-13.
  • What do you use when you have to store high cardinality metrics?
    5 projects | /r/golang | 13 Feb 2023
    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)
    5 projects | /r/golang | 13 Feb 2023
  • Show HN: SigNoz – open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Oct 2022
    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.

  • Timescale raises $110M Series C
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2022
    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

  • Tools for Querying Logs with SQL
    4 projects | dev.to | 11 Feb 2022
    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.
  • Benchmarking: TimescaleDB vs. ClickHouse
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2021
    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.

  • Zabbix anything I should know?
    3 projects | /r/sysadmin | 25 Oct 2021
    Promscale + TimescaleDB
  • A different and (often) better way to downsample your Prometheus metrics
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Oct 2021
    (NB: Promscale team member)

    Thanks for the positive feedback!

    Is there anything in particular you are missing in Promscale to be used as a backend for multiple Prometheus instances?

    We added support for multi-tenancy a couple of months ago (https://blog.timescale.com/blog/simplified-prometheus-monito...)

    And thanks to a community contribution by 2nick on github Promscale can be integrated with Thanos :) (https://github.com/timescale/promscale/pull/664)

  • Thanos Integration with Prometheus
    4 projects | /r/sre | 23 Aug 2021
    No. No you can’t store Prometheus metrics in Postgres out of the box AFAIK. You’d need to run a service that provides a remote write endpoint to proxy metrics into Postgres. There’s probably a few open source projects out there similar to: https://github.com/timescale/Promscale
  • TimescaleDB Raises $40M
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2021
    (Timescale engineer here). We believe so and we have customers using us for just that. We haven't created our own product for that yet (as we have for metrics -- Promscale) but it is an idea we are playing with. You may want to look at our Promscale design doc[1] for ideas on table layout.

    [1] https://tsdb.co/prom-design-doc

TimescaleDB

Posts with mentions or reviews of TimescaleDB. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-11.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing promscale and TimescaleDB you can also consider the following projects:

thanos - Highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities. A CNCF Incubating project.

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data

TDengine - TDengine is an open source, high-performance, cloud native time-series database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Cars, Industrial IoT and DevOps.

GORM - The fantastic ORM library for Golang, aims to be developer friendly

kube-thanos - Kubernetes specific configuration for deploying Thanos.

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

temporal_tables - Temporal Tables PostgreSQL Extension

pgbouncer - lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL

Telegraf - The plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics.

VictoriaMetrics - VictoriaMetrics: fast, cost-effective monitoring solution and time series database

citus - Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension