Graphite vs Prometheus vs StatsD

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Graphite

390
419
+ 1
42
Prometheus

4.2K
3.8K
+ 1
239
StatsD

302
291
+ 1
31

Graphite vs Prometheus vs StatsD: What are the differences?

  1. Data Model: Graphite uses a fixed data model with a hierarchical structure, where metrics are organized in a tree-like hierarchy. In contrast, Prometheus utilizes a dimensional data model, allowing for more flexible and efficient data querying based on key-value pairs.

  2. Data Storage: Graphite typically stores data as flat files on disk, which can lead to scalability challenges for high-volume data. On the other hand, Prometheus stores data in a time-series database with more advanced storage mechanisms, enabling better performance and scalability.

  3. Data Collection: StatsD is a simple protocol for collecting and aggregating custom application metrics, primarily focusing on UDP-based metric collection. In comparison, Prometheus comes with a built-in metrics collection mechanism, offering support for various service discovery options and comprehensive metric instrumentation.

  4. Alerting Capabilities: While Graphite lacks built-in alerting capabilities, Prometheus has robust alerting functionalities integrated directly into the system, allowing users to define complex alerting rules based on metric queries and thresholds.

  5. Data Visualization: Graphite provides basic data visualization capabilities through its integrated graphing features, but it may require additional tools for more advanced visualization. On the contrary, Prometheus offers built-in Grafana integration for sophisticated and customizable dashboard creation and visualization.

  6. Community Support: Prometheus has a vibrant and active community that regularly contributes to the development and maintenance of the project, ensuring frequent updates, enhancements, and support. In contrast, Graphite's community support may be comparatively less extensive, impacting the availability of resources and expertise for troubleshooting and optimization.

In Summary, Graphite, Prometheus, and StatsD differ in their data models, storage mechanisms, data collection approaches, alerting capabilities, data visualization options, and community support.

Advice on Graphite, Prometheus, and StatsD
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 792.7K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 578K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 721.7K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Decisions about Graphite, Prometheus, and StatsD
Matt Menzenski
Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt · | 16 upvotes · 994.1K views

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

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Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 359K views

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

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Pros of Graphite
Pros of Prometheus
Pros of StatsD
  • 16
    Render any graph
  • 9
    Great functions to apply on timeseries
  • 8
    Well supported integrations
  • 6
    Includes event tracking
  • 3
    Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
  • 9
    Open source
  • 7
    Single responsibility
  • 5
    Efficient wire format
  • 3
    Handles aggregation
  • 3
    Loads of integrations
  • 1
    Many implementations
  • 1
    Scales well
  • 1
    Simple to use
  • 1
    NodeJS

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Cons of Graphite
Cons of Prometheus
Cons of StatsD
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 12
      Just for metrics
    • 6
      Bad UI
    • 6
      Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
    • 4
      Not easy to configure and use
    • 3
      Supports only active agents
    • 2
      Written in Go
    • 2
      TLS is quite difficult to understand
    • 2
      Requires multiple applications and tools
    • 1
      Single point of failure
    • 1
      No authentication; cannot be used over Internet

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Graphite?

    Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

    What is Prometheus?

    Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

    What is StatsD?

    It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

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    Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
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