thanos VS m3

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/

M3DB.

> I can't find any other open source time series database except Mimir/Cortex which allows this much scale (clustering options in their open source version)

The following open source time series databases also can scale horizontally to many nodes:

- Thanos - https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/

- M3 - https://github.com/m3db/m3

- Cluster version of VictoriaMetrics - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/Cluster-VictoriaMetrics.htm... (I'm CTO at VictoriaMetrics)

> Can we use Prometheus/Mimir as general purpose time series database?

This depends on what do you mean under "general purpose time series database". Prometheus/Mimir are optimized for storing (timestamp, value) series where timestamp is a unix timestamp in milliseconds and value is a floating-point number. Each series has a name and can have arbitrary set of additional (label=value) labels. Prometheus/Mimir aren't optimized for storing and processing series of other value types such as strings (aka logs) and complex datastructures (aka events and traces).

So, if you need storing time series with floating-point values, then Prometheus/Mimir may be a good fit. Otherwise take a look at ClickHouse [1] - it can efficiently store and process time series with values of arbitrary types.

[1] https://clickhouse.com/