thanos VS m3

Compare thanos vs m3 and see what are their differences.

thanos

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

m3

M3 monorepo - Distributed TSDB, Aggregator and Query Engine, Prometheus Sidecar, Graphite Compatible, Metrics Platform (by m3db)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
thanos m3
66 2
12,530 4,632
1.1% 1.0%
9.6 6.1
5 days ago 17 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
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.

thanos

Posts with mentions or reviews of thanos. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-10.
  • Looking for a way to remote in to K's of raspberry pi's...
    11 projects | /r/sysadmin | 10 Dec 2023
    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).
  • thanos VS openobserve - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 30 Aug 2023
  • FLaNK Stack Weekly for 24 July 2023
    12 projects | dev.to | 30 Jul 2023
  • FLaNK Stack Weekly for 10 July 2023
    11 projects | dev.to | 10 Jul 2023
  • Is anyone frustrated with anything about Prometheus?
    5 projects | /r/PrometheusMonitoring | 18 Jun 2023
    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.
  • Thousandeyes Pricing Model
    2 projects | /r/networking | 12 Apr 2023
    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.
  • Monitoring many cluster k8s
    6 projects | /r/kubernetes | 21 Mar 2023
    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.
  • Best unicorn monitoring system?
    3 projects | /r/sysadmin | 17 Mar 2023
    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.
  • Top CNCF Projects to look out for in 2023
    5 projects | dev.to | 23 Jan 2023
    Thanos belongs in Observability and Analysis / Monitoring as it is based on Prometheus, a monitoring CNCF project. It makes it easier to scale Prometheus horizontally and obtain a global view of data from several Prometheus servers. Thanos promises high availability and virtually unlimited historical data storage. This year, it got in the top 5 CNCF projects with the most contributors.
  • What opensource tools have changed your company culture?
    4 projects | /r/devops | 10 Dec 2022
    This is a reasonably small setup, but having multiple deployment zones means you will need Prometheus plus a centralizing overlay. For example Thanos or Mimir.

m3

Posts with mentions or reviews of m3. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-06-21.
  • Prometheus federation or Thanos?
    6 projects | /r/PrometheusMonitoring | 21 Jun 2022
    M3DB.
  • Grafana Mimir – 1B active series TSDB
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2022
    > 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/

What are some alternatives?

When comparing thanos and m3 you can also consider the following projects:

mimir - Grafana Mimir provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus.

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

cortex - A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.

promscale - [DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.

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

istio - Connect, secure, control, and observe services.

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

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

vector - A high-performance observability data pipeline.

rancher - Complete container management platform