Prometheus or Graphite - which should I choose?

Graphite and Prometheus seem pitted head to head in the world of monitoring right now. As a provider of Graphite as-a-service, we’re often asked: “What should I choose?”

While both are solid options, there are key differences between the two that users should keep in mind when making a decision.

Here, we break down the most important distinctions and look at how the experience of using each service compares.

Overview

Prometheus and Graphite are both open-source projects built around a time series database. This means all datapoints are labelled with names and/or tags which identify them as part of a unique time series. Prometheus has always supported tagging (called labels, in Prometheus terms), and Graphite introduced tags near the start of 2018.

The most obvious difference between Prometheus and Graphite when you first start using them is that where Prometheus reaches out to request metrics from target endpoints, Graphite passively receives anything it’s sent, provided the formatting is correct. This is referred to as Pull metrics vs Push metrics, models that form the core of many other distinctions between the services.

Let’s take a look at Graphite

Source: https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_images/overview.png

Graphite has been around for a decade and there’s a reason for that — what it lacks in frills, it makes up for in useability and widespread support …

Read the rest of this article here on the MetricFire website.

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