Cortex Alternatives

cortex reviews and mentions

• Centralized solution for Prometheus?
  4 projects | reddit.com/r/PrometheusMonitoring | 13 Feb 2023

  You can use the Remote write feature to send to a centralized location. It would have to be scalable like Cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/

• Where to store high-cardinality metrics?
  4 projects | reddit.com/r/sre | 7 Feb 2023

  Cortex is not really good for high-cardinality metrics (if you are talking about https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex)

• Building a distributed lab with an observability stack
  3 projects | reddit.com/r/homelab | 7 Aug 2022

  For a homelab I think prometheus + grafana is easy to get started and scales well. There are lots of ways to set up the architecture. Prometheus can write to a directory on a filesystem, it can be set to write to a remote server, and there are other projects to integrate object storage (s3, minio, etc) or influxdb for long term storage and downsampling.

• Prometheus federation or Thanos?
  6 projects | reddit.com/r/PrometheusMonitoring | 21 Jun 2022

  Cortex (it is renamed to Mimir recently).

• Building my first Monitoring stack - Security concerns
  5 projects | reddit.com/r/PrometheusMonitoring | 30 Apr 2022
• Grafana Mimir – 1B active series TSDB
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2022

  Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I don't work on the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. I have my own very long held opinions about Free and Open Source software, and I am only speaking for myself.

  To me, the AGPLv3 license isn't about forcing software users to "give changes back" to a project. It is about giving the permissions to users of software that are necessary for Software Freedom [1] when they access a program over a network. In practice, that means that changes often flow "upstream" to copyleft licensed programs one way or another. But it was never about obligating changes to be "given back" to upstream. In my personal opinion, you should be "free to fork" Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Indeed, the Grafana folks seem to have decided to do that with Grafana Mimir.

  Personally, I hope that they accept contributions under the AGPLv3 license, and hold themselves to the same obligations that others are held to with regard to providing corresponding source code of derivative works when it is made available to users over a network. In my personal opinion, too often companies use a contributor agreement that excuses them from those obligations, and also allows them to sell the software to others under licenses that do not carry copyleft obligations. See [2] for a blog post that goes into some detail about this.

  If you look at the Coretex project MAINTAINERS file [3], you will see that there are two folks listed that currently work at AWS, but no other company other than Grafana Labs today. I would love to see more diversity in maintainers for a project like this, as I think too many maintainers from any one company isn't the best for long term project sustainability.

  I think if you look at the Cortex Community Meeting minutes [4], you can see that AWS folks are regularly "showing up" in healthy numbers, and working collaboratively with anyone who accepts the open invitation to participate. There have been some pretty big improvements to Coretex that have merged lately, like some of the work on parallel compaction [5, 6].

  TL;DR, I think it is easy to jump to some conclusions about how things are going in a FOSS project that don't hold water if you do some cursory exploration. I think best way to know what's going on in a project is to get involved!

  --

  [1] the rights needed to: run the program for any purpose; to study how the program works, and modify it; to redistribute copies; to distribute copies of modified versions to others

  [2] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...

  [3] https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/blob/master/MAINTAIN...

  [4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1shtXSAqp3t7fiC-9uZcKkq3m...

  [5] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/scaling-cortex-with-...

  [6] https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/pull/4624

• Ask HN: How to built a HIGHLY scalable API monitoring tool?
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2021
• The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Nov 2021

  > [...] that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.

  I had to Google because I've never heard of any of those. Did I find the right ones?

  https://prometheus.io/

  https://cortexmetrics.io/

  https://grafana.com/

  Mine is much more primitive. My indoor temperature monitor is an ESP8266 that uploads the temperature to a simple PHP page that saves it in an sqlite DB. A cron job runs a Perl script every few minutes that extract the data for the last hour, 3 hours, 12 hours, 48 hours, and since the beginning of time and uses gnuplot to produce PNG graphs. There's a static page on my server that displays those graphs.

  My outdoor temperature monitor uses a cheap AcuRite 433 MHz indoor/outdoor thermometer I bought. I have an RPi with an RTL-SDR attached spying on the communications between the AcuRite sensor outside and the AcuRite display inside using rtl_433. A script looks at the rtl_433 and finds the AcuRite sensor data and puts it in an sqlite DB. I haven't yet gotten around to making something to graph it.

  The nice thing about that approach is that it was also easy to add support for other 433 MHz wireless sensors near me, such as the AcuRite fridge/freezer thermometer I have. I can also see a few assorted sensors of neighbors (temperature, humidity, soil moisture, tire pressure, wind speed, wind direction, rain, and a few other random things). If I wanted to it would be easy to add them to the DB.

  When I made a wireless tipping range gauge recently. I used a 433 MHz transmitter module [1] and added a decoder [2] to rtl_433 that understands my data stream format. That gets my data into the rtl_433 output. No need to futz around with 433 MHz receiver modules which appear to be a pain in the ass [3]. An ATTiny85 counts the tips and runs the transmitter. The ATTiny85, the transmitter module, a battery holder, an RJ11 socket because the rain gauge has an RJ11 connector, a board to put those things on [4], and a small waterproof case is pretty much the complete parts list.

  I think I'm going to standardize on this general approach. For things that do not have WiFi and only need to report data 433 MHz modules and custom decoders fro rtl_433 on the RPi. For things that do have WiFi, such as any future ESP projects I do, they will just use WiFi to talk to the RPi. If anything needs to get sent outside of my LAN the RPi will handle it.

  The RPi is also currently controlling a space heater in my living room, getting connection data from my cable modem periodically and recording that in an sqlite DB, and serving a simple web page that lets me quickly change inputs and volume on my Denon receiver and so I'm already pretty much committed to keeping it running all the time.

  [1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10534

  [2] Decoders can be specified in a simple text file. Here's the one for my rain guage as an example:

    decoder {

• How are you tracking your SLA's/SLO
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/sre | 3 Apr 2021

  Thanos or Cortex.

• msp monitoring
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/networking | 22 Mar 2021

  You will probably want to look at Cortex, it's designed to be the multi-tenant database. You can either build it up yourself, or use Grafana hosted version.

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