Azure Monitor vs Prometheus

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Azure Monitor vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Azure Monitor and Prometheus are both monitoring solutions. Here are the key differences between them.

  1. Scalability: One major difference between Azure Monitor and Prometheus is their scalability. Azure Monitor is a fully managed service provided by Microsoft, which means it can automatically scale to handle large workloads without any manual intervention. On the other hand, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool that requires manual scaling as the workload increases.

  2. Data Collection: Azure Monitor offers a wide range of data collection methods, including agents, APIs, and platform integrations. It can collect data from various sources such as virtual machines, containers, and Azure services. In contrast, Prometheus primarily collects data using its own built-in client libraries, requiring application owners to instrument their code to expose metrics.

  3. Alerting: Azure Monitor provides advanced alerting capabilities, allowing users to create alert rules based on metrics, logs, and events. It also supports various notification channels such as email, SMS, and webhooks. Prometheus also supports alerting, but its alerting system is less robust compared to Azure Monitor. It has limited built-in notification options and relies heavily on external alert managers for advanced alert management and routing.

  4. Dashboards: Azure Monitor offers a user-friendly dashboarding experience with drag-and-drop capabilities and a wide range of visualization options. It provides pre-built dashboards for monitoring Azure resources and also allows users to create custom dashboards. Prometheus, on the other hand, provides a basic web interface for data visualization, but it primarily focuses on exposing data via its query language and relies on external tools for more advanced dashboarding capabilities.

  5. Integration with Ecosystem: Azure Monitor is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, making it an ideal monitoring solution for organizations using Azure services. It provides out-of-the-box integration with various Azure services, including Virtual Machines, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Functions. Prometheus, being an open-source tool, is more agnostic and can be used with any infrastructure or cloud provider. It has integrations for various platforms and services, including Kubernetes, AWS, and GCP.

  6. Pricing Model: Azure Monitor has a usage-based pricing model, where users pay for the data ingested and the features they use. It offers different pricing tiers with varying levels of functionality and scalability. Prometheus, on the other hand, is open-source and free to use. However, there may be additional costs associated with running Prometheus at scale, such as storage costs for the collected metrics and the infrastructure required for running Prometheus servers.

In summary, Azure Monitor is a fully managed service with auto-scaling capabilities, comprehensive data collection methods, advanced alerting and dashboarding features, tight integration with Azure services, and a usage-based pricing model. On the other hand, Prometheus is an open-source tool that requires manual scaling, primarily collects data through client libraries, has limited built-in alerting and dashboarding capabilities, and can be used with various platforms and services.

Advice on Azure Monitor and Prometheus
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 775.5K 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 · 560.8K 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 · 705.1K 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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Pros of Azure Monitor
Pros of Prometheus
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 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

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Azure Monitor
    Cons of Prometheus
      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

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Azure Monitor?

      It provides sophisticated tools for collecting and analyzing telemetry that allow you to maximize the performance and availability of your cloud and on-premises resources and applications.

      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.

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