thanos VS promscale

Compare thanos vs promscale and see what are their differences.

thanos

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

promscale

[DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB. (by timescale)
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thanos promscale
66 18
12,530 1,330
1.1% -0.2%
9.6 0.0
5 days ago 1 day 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.

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

What are some alternatives?

When comparing thanos and promscale 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.

TimescaleDB - An open-source time-series SQL database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries. Packaged as a PostgreSQL extension.

kube-thanos - Kubernetes specific configuration for deploying Thanos.

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

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

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

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