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Prometheus is winning because push-based metrics are the wrong approach. Integration with service discovery to tell if your metrics are operating or not is, in

Prometheus is winning because push-based metrics are the wrong approach. Integration with service discovery to tell if your metrics are operating or not is, in my experience, the #2 or #3 preventer of outages.

sciurus 8y ago
If I had to speculate why Prometheus is doing well, I'd put the simplicity of deployment and ongoing operations first, and probably the great integration with Kubernetes second. I think that if it had gone with a push-based model it would have been just as successful. Push vs Pull is unrelated to integrating service discovery. Right now I push metrics to Datadog. It can tell if my metrics are operating or not, because it's aware of the state of the Datadog agent and of what the EC2 API reports.
comboy 8y ago
I love Prometheus but in some cases push-based metrics have they advantages. E.g. I'm using push based system in my home automation, where apart from metrics (stats of temp and humidity) it also works as a state machine (door open, switch off) so that I can build logic on top of that by listening to changes. I think having realtime data helps in evaluating some server problems too. Obviously everything depends on use case and not every solution scales well. Re having downtime indicator that's really a few lines of code, if no event received in the last X seconds then the host is down or busy enough to need attention. With websocket connection you can react to such downtime pretty much immediately instead of waiting for the next poll. I know there are workarounds but I really wish Prometheus would support some push based system out of the box. It also helps with tracking simple scripts that only run occasionally etc. And yes, I know, they provide workarounds, the docs are really good. It seems to me that having a realtime system with push based metrics is cheap enough that we should have it already. Imagine ideal monitoring system of the future. Does it poll and refresh data every so often or are you able to see everything as it's happening?
deleted 8y ago
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sciurus 8y ago

If I had to speculate why Prometheus is doing well, I'd put the simplicity of deployment and ongoing operations first, and probably the great integration with Kubernetes second. I think that if it had gone with a push-based model it would have been just as successful. Push vs Pull is unrelated to integrating service discovery. Right now I push metrics to Datadog. It can tell if my metrics are operating or not, because it's aware of the state of the Datadog agent and of what the EC2 API reports.

comboy 8y ago

I love Prometheus but in some cases push-based metrics have they advantages. E.g. I'm using push based system in my home automation, where apart from metrics (stats of temp and humidity) it also works as a state machine (door open, switch off) so that I can build logic on top of that by listening to changes. I think having realtime data helps in evaluating some server problems too. Obviously everything depends on use case and not every solution scales well. Re having downtime indicator that's really a few lines of code, if no event received in the last X seconds then the host is down or busy enough to need attention. With websocket connection you can react to such downtime pretty much immediately instead of waiting for the next poll. I know there are workarounds but I really wish Prometheus would support some push based system out of the box. It also helps with tracking simple scripts that only run occasionally etc. And yes, I know, they provide workarounds, the docs are really good. It seems to me that having a realtime system with push based metrics is cheap enough that we should have it already. Imagine ideal monitoring system of the future. Does it poll and refresh data every so often or are you able to see everything as it's happening?

deleted 8y ago

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