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I am about the biggest Prometheus stan that you can find, but I will not mock or denigrate influx db. They are a runner-up, but there is room in this market for

I am about the biggest Prometheus stan that you can find, but I will not mock or denigrate influx db. They are a runner-up, but there is room in this market for runner-ups, and their feature set does match some that Prometheus is not good at.

vb-8448 3y ago
Don't get me wrong, I don't denigrate Influx DB. They have some interesting features that prometheus doesn't have, I just don't think that this features can lead to a mass adoption(and money). Let's put this way: is there any killer feature that can ditch most of the Prometheus installations in their favor?
- ilyt 3y ago
  And it *has* to be feature, not just "it's faster", because they are (much) faster time-series databases that support PromQL and are near-drop-in to your infrastructure.
ilyt 3y ago
I think they missed one thing: Nobody wants to get locked in with the runner-up. If they on top of that provided some compatibility layer for Prometheus/PromQL, like few other competitors did, then the prospective enterprise client have warm fuzzies that if they don't like it they don't need to rewrite entirety of their stack to work with something else. People could also use the existing ecosystem and "just plug it in", even replacing Prometheus instances they might have. In the end people want to ingest the metrics and display it in Grafana. They don't need another visualisation solution that has less support and documentation. They don't want to learn new weird query language that is simulatenously more verbose and less readable than PromQL or even influxQL from v1.
manicennui 3y ago
I think you'd find that Prometheus is way behind a number of solutions in the corporate world, including Graphite, DogStatsD, etc. Popularity on HN does not translate to real world popularity.
- vb-8448 3y ago
  Most of the companies in the corporate world have more than a monitoring system, at least 3 in my experience: sysadmins have at least one, network guys another one and one for legacy platforms (mainframes, as400 and so on). Plus, in the last years with the rise of Kubernetes, most corporates have at least one cluster with Prometheus monitoring it. Always, base on my experience, Prometheus is very popular, but the adoption is not so wide due to its `oss nature`: CTOs want someone to blame when things go wrong.
- hagen1778 3y ago
  That's only a matter of time when they hire younger engineers who are familiar with modern monitoring systems and eager to apply their knowledge in practice.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    What is it that you think prometheus offers over other solutions? It is more likely that the younger engineer is going to learn that companies don't care about what is popular on HN.
    - hagen1778 3y ago
      > What is it that you think prometheus offers over other solutions? I like Prometheus and think this is a great piece of software. But even if we won't go into actual details, Prometheus is baked in into Kubernetes monitoring [0]. That's the first monitoring system young engineers will meet with when learning k8s. Although, k8s and Prometheus are both CNCF projects which means both of them will be promoted in synergy with each other. > It is more likely that the younger engineer is going to learn that companies don't care about what is popular on HN. This is not what I think younger engineers do :) [0] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug/debug-cluster/resource-usage-monitoring/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug/debug-cluster/resourc...
- kiitos 3y ago
  In the year of our lord 2023, Graphite, Statsd, etc. are anachronisms. Prometheus is wildly superior to those tools.

vb-8448 3y ago

Don't get me wrong, I don't denigrate Influx DB. They have some interesting features that prometheus doesn't have, I just don't think that this features can lead to a mass adoption(and money). Let's put this way: is there any killer feature that can ditch most of the Prometheus installations in their favor?

ilyt 3y ago
And it *has* to be feature, not just "it's faster", because they are (much) faster time-series databases that support PromQL and are near-drop-in to your infrastructure.

ilyt 3y ago

I think they missed one thing: Nobody wants to get locked in with the runner-up. If they on top of that provided some compatibility layer for Prometheus/PromQL, like few other competitors did, then the prospective enterprise client have warm fuzzies that if they don't like it they don't need to rewrite entirety of their stack to work with something else. People could also use the existing ecosystem and "just plug it in", even replacing Prometheus instances they might have. In the end people want to ingest the metrics and display it in Grafana. They don't need another visualisation solution that has less support and documentation. They don't want to learn new weird query language that is simulatenously more verbose and less readable than PromQL or even influxQL from v1.

manicennui 3y ago

I think you'd find that Prometheus is way behind a number of solutions in the corporate world, including Graphite, DogStatsD, etc. Popularity on HN does not translate to real world popularity.

vb-8448 3y ago
Most of the companies in the corporate world have more than a monitoring system, at least 3 in my experience: sysadmins have at least one, network guys another one and one for legacy platforms (mainframes, as400 and so on). Plus, in the last years with the rise of Kubernetes, most corporates have at least one cluster with Prometheus monitoring it. Always, base on my experience, Prometheus is very popular, but the adoption is not so wide due to its `oss nature`: CTOs want someone to blame when things go wrong.
hagen1778 3y ago
That's only a matter of time when they hire younger engineers who are familiar with modern monitoring systems and eager to apply their knowledge in practice.
- manicennui 3y ago
  What is it that you think prometheus offers over other solutions? It is more likely that the younger engineer is going to learn that companies don't care about what is popular on HN.
  - hagen1778 3y ago
    > What is it that you think prometheus offers over other solutions? I like Prometheus and think this is a great piece of software. But even if we won't go into actual details, Prometheus is baked in into Kubernetes monitoring [0]. That's the first monitoring system young engineers will meet with when learning k8s. Although, k8s and Prometheus are both CNCF projects which means both of them will be promoted in synergy with each other. > It is more likely that the younger engineer is going to learn that companies don't care about what is popular on HN. This is not what I think younger engineers do :) [0] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug/debug-cluster/resource-usage-monitoring/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug/debug-cluster/resourc...
kiitos 3y ago
In the year of our lord 2023, Graphite, Statsd, etc. are anachronisms. Prometheus is wildly superior to those tools.