Alternatives to Prometheus

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. Behind the scenes the Config API is built with Go , GRPC and Envoy.

At Segment, we build new services in Go by default. The language is simple so new team members quickly ramp up on a codebase. The tool chain is fast so developers get immediate feedback when they break code, tests or integrations with other systems. The runtime is fast so it performs great at scale.

For the newest round of APIs we adopted the GRPC service #framework.

The Protocol Buffer service definition language makes it easy to design type-safe and consistent APIs, thanks to ecosystem tools like the Google API Design Guide for API standards, uber/prototool for formatting and linting .protos and lyft/protoc-gen-validate for defining field validations, and grpc-gateway for defining REST mapping.

With a well designed .proto, its easy to generate a Go server interface and a TypeScript client, providing type-safe RPC between languages.

For the API gateway and RPC we adopted the Envoy service proxy.

The internet-facing segmentapis.com endpoint is an Envoy front proxy that rate-limits and authenticates every request. It then transcodes a #REST / #JSON request to an upstream GRPC request. The upstream GRPC servers are running an Envoy sidecar configured for Datadog stats.

The result is API #security , #reliability and consistent #observability through Envoy configuration, not code.

We experimented with Swagger service definitions, but the spec is sprawling and the generated clients and server stubs leave a lot to be desired. GRPC and .proto and the Go implementation feels better designed and implemented. Thanks to the GRPC tooling and ecosystem you can generate Swagger from .protos, but it’s effectively impossible to go the other way.

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

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.

Why we spent several years building an open source, large-scale metrics alerting system, M3, built for Prometheus:

By late 2014, all services, infrastructure, and servers at Uber emitted metrics to a Graphite stack that stored them using the Whisper file format in a sharded Carbon cluster. We used Grafana for dashboarding and Nagios for alerting, issuing Graphite threshold checks via source-controlled scripts. While this worked for a while, expanding the Carbon cluster required a manual resharding process and, due to lack of replication, any single node’s disk failure caused permanent loss of its associated metrics. In short, this solution was not able to meet our needs as the company continued to grow.

To ensure the scalability of Uber’s metrics backend, we decided to build out a system that provided fault tolerant metrics ingestion, storage, and querying as a managed platform...

https://eng.uber.com/m3/

(GitHub : https://github.com/m3db/m3)

I've used more and more of New Relic Insights here in my work at Kong. New Relic Insights is a "time series event database as a service" with a super-easy API for inserting custom events, and a flexible query language for building visualization widgets and dashboards.

I'm a big fan of New Relic Insights when I have data I know I need to analyze, but perhaps I'm not exactly sure how I want to analyze it in the future. For example, at Kong we recently wanted to get some understanding of our open source community's activity on our GitHub repos. I was able to quickly configure GitHub to send webhooks to Zapier , which in turn posted the JSON to New Relic Insights.

Insights is schema-less and configuration-less - just start posting JSON key value pairs, then start querying your data.

Within minutes, data was flowing from GitHub to Insights, and I was building widgets on my Insights dashboard to help my colleagues visualize the activity of our open source community.

#GitHubAnalytics #OpenSourceCommunityAnalytics #CommunityAnalytics #RepoAnalytics

Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

Future improvements / technology decisions included:

Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

Hi everyone. I'm trying to create my personal syslog monitoring.

1. To get the logs, I have uncertainty to choose the way: 1.1 Use Logstash like a TCP server. 1.2 Implement a Go TCP server.

2. To store and plot data. 2.1 Use Elasticsearch tools. 2.2 Use InfluxDB and Grafana.

I would like to know... Which is a cheaper and scalable solution?

Or even if there is a better way to do it.

Hi all, I am trying to decide on a database for time-series data. The data could be tracking some simple series like statistics over time or could be a nested JSON (multi-level nested). I have been experimenting with InfluxDB for the former case of a simple list of variables over time. The continuous queries are powerful too. But for the latter case, where InfluxDB requires to flatten out a nested JSON before saving it into the database the complexity arises. The nested JSON could be objects or a list of objects and objects under objects in which a complete flattening doesn't leave the data in a state for the queries I'm thinking.

[ 
  { "timestamp": "2021-09-06T12:51:00Z",
    "name": "Name1",
    "books": [
        { "title": "Book1", "page": 100 },
        { "title": "Book2", "page": 280 },
    ]
  },
 { "timestamp": "2021-09-06T12:52:00Z",
   "name": "Name2",
   "books": [
       { "title": "Book1", "page": 320},
       { "title": "Book2", "page": 530 },
       { "title": "Book3", "page": 150 },
   ]
 }
]

Sample query: With a time range, for name xyz, find all the book title for which # of page < 400.

If I flatten it completely, it will result in fields like books_0_title, books_0_page, books_1_title, books_1_page, ... And by losing the nested context it will be hard to return one field (title) where some condition for another field (page) satisfies.

Appreciate any suggestions. Even a piece of generic advice on handling the time-series and choosing the database is welcome!

I am designing a Django application for my organization which will be used as an internal tool. The infra team said that I will not be having SSH access to the production server and I will have to log all my backend application messages to Splunk. I have no knowledge of Splunk so the following are the approaches I am considering: Approach 1: Create an hourly cron job that uploads the server log file to some Splunk storage for later analysis. - Is this possible? Approach 2: Is it possible just to stream the logs to some splunk endpoint? (If yes, I feel network usage and communication overhead will be a pain-point for my application)

Is there any better or standard approach? Thanks in advance.

I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.

Why we spent several years building an open source, large-scale metrics alerting system, M3, built for Prometheus:

By late 2014, all services, infrastructure, and servers at Uber emitted metrics to a Graphite stack that stored them using the Whisper file format in a sharded Carbon cluster. We used Grafana for dashboarding and Nagios for alerting, issuing Graphite threshold checks via source-controlled scripts. While this worked for a while, expanding the Carbon cluster required a manual resharding process and, due to lack of replication, any single node’s disk failure caused permanent loss of its associated metrics. In short, this solution was not able to meet our needs as the company continued to grow.

To ensure the scalability of Uber’s metrics backend, we decided to build out a system that provided fault tolerant metrics ingestion, storage, and querying as a managed platform...

https://eng.uber.com/m3/

(GitHub : https://github.com/m3db/m3)

A huge part of our continuous deployment practices is to have granular alerting and monitoring across the platform. To do this, we run Sentry on-premise, inside our VPCs, for our event alerting, and we run an awesome observability and monitoring system consisting of StatsD, Graphite and Grafana. We have dashboards using this system to monitor our core subsystems so that we can know the health of any given subsystem at any moment. This system ties into our PagerDuty rotation, as well as alerts from some of our Amazon CloudWatch alarms (we’re looking to migrate all of these to our internal monitoring system soon).

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

I am looking for an easy to set up and use monitoring solution for my servers and network infrastructure. What are the main differences between Checkmk and Zabbix? What would you recommend and why?

Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.

Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS

Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure

Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server

Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.

Please advise on the above. Thanks!

We are evaluating an APM tool and would like to select between AppDynamics or Datadog. Our applications are largely hosted on Microsoft Azure but we would keep the option to move to AWS or Google Cloud Platform in the future.

In addition to core Azure services, we will be hosting other components - including MongoDB, Keycloak, PagerDuty, etc. Our applications are largely C# and React-based using frontend for Backend patterns and Azure API gateway. In addition, there are close to 50+ external services integrated using both REST and SOAP.