Scrape is typically just how people get started and works well for small and medium things, it gets you a long way before you need to consider it. Prometheus r

Scrape is typically just how people get started and works well for small and medium things, it gets you a long way before you need to consider it. Prometheus remote_write is what people graduate to, this gets you the rest of the way, and you are correct it's less PITA at scale. If you're looking for retention your choices are large, there's Cortex (CNCF), Mimir (most Cortex work moved here), Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, TimeScale, Chronosphere, and many others. All seek to do a similar thing from a distance, they all store metrics (likely from Prometheus) and allow retention and some variety of how to query it (if you want SQL you got it, if you want non-standard functions you go it, if your reads are more important than your writes you got it, if you need a billion active series you got it, etc). If what you want is "Prometheus but bigger" then the Prometheus project provides a compliance suite that you can run to help you evaluate your options: https://github.com/prometheus/compliance https://github.com/prometheus/compliance I work for Grafana Labs, and we have maintainers working for us who have touched Prometheus, Thanos, Cortex and Mimir. Mimir is currently the largest investment we have https://github.com/grafana/mimir https://github.com/grafana/mimir and it is 100% compliant with Prometheus (though that is about to be temporarily untrue as Native Histograms is landing in Prometheus soon https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/milestone/10 https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/milestone/10 and we'll need to add a perfectly compliant support to Mimir to get back to being compliant).