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Pingdom vs Prometheus: What are the differences?
Introduction
Pingdom and Prometheus are both popular monitoring tools used for monitoring the performance and availability of websites and web applications. However, there are several key differences between the two that set them apart.
Data Collection and Storage: Pingdom is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution that collects data from external servers located around the world. It stores the data in its own infrastructure, allowing users to access it through their interface. On the other hand, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool that relies on an agent running on each monitored server to collect data. It stores the collected data locally on each server and provides a query language to retrieve and analyze the data.
Alerting Capabilities: Pingdom provides robust alerting capabilities, including email, SMS, and push notifications, to notify users when issues are detected. It allows users to customize alert conditions based on various metrics and set up multiple alert channels. Prometheus also offers alerting functionality, but it requires users to set up and configure a separate alert manager component. This allows for more advanced alerting options and integrations with other systems.
Scalability: Pingdom is a hosted service, allowing users to rely on the infrastructure provided by the service provider. This makes it suitable for smaller-scale monitoring needs. Prometheus, being open-source, can be self-hosted and scaled according to the user's requirements. It can handle large-scale deployments and is designed to handle the high volume of data commonly associated with monitoring large infrastructures.
Service Discovery: Prometheus has built-in service discovery capabilities, which allows it to automatically discover and monitor new instances of services as they are added to the infrastructure. Pingdom, on the other hand, requires manual configuration of the services to be monitored.
Data Visualization: Pingdom provides a user-friendly web interface with pre-built charts and graphs to visualize the monitored data. It offers various predefined reports and dashboards for quick insights. Prometheus, being more flexible, requires users to set up their own visualization tools, such as Grafana, to create customized dashboards and visualizations.
Integration Ecosystem: Prometheus has a vast integration ecosystem with a wide range of third-party tools and services. It can easily be integrated with other monitoring solutions, logging systems, and notification services. Pingdom also offers integration options with external services, but the integration ecosystem is more limited compared to Prometheus.
In summary, Pingdom is a SaaS monitoring tool with a focus on ease of use, pre-built visualizations, and external data collection, while Prometheus is an open-source solution with a focus on scalability, flexible data storage, and advanced alerting capabilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
Pros of Pingdom
- Simple and reliable224
- Monitoring your websites103
- Easy to use dashboard75
- Email, text & twitter alerts65
- Free tier43
- Performance data23
- Detailed Reports14
- Email Reports11
- Mobile App9
- Root Cause Analysis9
- 30-day risk free trial1
- Easy setup1
- IOS app1
Pros of Prometheus
- Powerful easy to use monitoring47
- Flexible query language38
- Dimensional data model32
- Alerts27
- Active and responsive community23
- Extensive integrations22
- Easy to setup19
- Beautiful Model and Query language12
- Easy to extend7
- Nice6
- Written in Go3
- Good for experimentation2
- Easy for monitoring1
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Cons of Pingdom
- Expensive4
- UI is incredibly complicated3
- Hard to set up alerts properly2
Cons of Prometheus
- Just for metrics12
- Bad UI6
- Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints6
- Not easy to configure and use4
- Supports only active agents3
- Written in Go2
- TLS is quite difficult to understand2
- Requires multiple applications and tools2
- Single point of failure1
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