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Prometheus vs RRDtool: What are the differences?

Introduction

Prometheus and RRDtool are both monitoring and data storage tools used in the field of IT infrastructure management. However, they have some key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. Data storage and retrieval: One major difference between Prometheus and RRDtool is the way they store and retrieve data. Prometheus adopts a pull-based approach, where it scrapes targets (e.g., servers) for metrics data on a regular basis. The data is stored in a time-series database and can be queried using PromQL, a query language specific to Prometheus. On the other hand, RRDtool uses a push-based approach, where data is sent to the storage system at regular intervals. The data is stored in Round Robin Database (RRD) files and can be accessed using RRDtool commands.

  2. Flexibility and customization: Another difference lies in the flexibility and customization options provided by Prometheus and RRDtool. Prometheus is highly flexible and can be easily extended with custom exporters and integrations. It allows users to define their own metrics and alerts based on specific requirements. RRDtool, on the other hand, is more rigid and has a predefined schema for storing data. While it provides some graphing and visualization capabilities, it may not offer the same level of customization as Prometheus.

  3. Scalability: Prometheus and RRDtool also differ in terms of scalability. Prometheus is designed to scale horizontally, which means it can handle large amounts of data by adding more instances of the Prometheus server. It also supports federation, allowing multiple Prometheus servers to be combined into a single view. RRDtool, on the other hand, has limitations in scaling as it relies on a single RRD file for storing data. While it can handle a significant amount of data, it may face challenges when dealing with extremely large-scale monitoring scenarios.

  4. Alerting capabilities: Another notable difference is in the alerting capabilities provided by Prometheus and RRDtool. Prometheus has a robust alerting system that allows users to define rules and send notifications when specific conditions are met. It supports various notification integrations, making it highly adaptable to different alerting workflows. RRDtool, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting mechanisms. Users need to rely on external tools or scripts to create alerts based on RRDtool data.

  5. Querying and processing capabilities: Prometheus and RRDtool also differ in their querying and processing capabilities. Prometheus provides a powerful querying language, PromQL, which allows users to perform complex queries on the stored time-series data. It also supports various functions and operators for data processing and aggregation. RRDtool, on the other hand, has a simpler querying mechanism focused on fetching and displaying data from RRD files. It may not offer the same level of flexibility and processing capabilities as Prometheus.

  6. Community and ecosystem: Lastly, Prometheus and RRDtool have different community and ecosystem support. Prometheus has a large and active community with a wide range of exporters, integrations, and plugins developed by the community. It has become the de facto standard for monitoring modern cloud-native environments. RRDtool, on the other hand, has been around for a longer time and has a mature ecosystem with various tools and libraries built around it. However, its community may not be as active or extensive as that of Prometheus.

In summary, Prometheus and RRDtool differ in their data storage and retrieval approaches, flexibility and customization options, scalability, alerting capabilities, querying and processing capabilities, as well as community and ecosystem support.

Advice on Prometheus and RRDtool
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 782.1K 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 · 567.4K 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 · 711.4K 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 Prometheus and RRDtool
Matt Menzenski
Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt · | 15 upvotes · 985.8K 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 · 352.8K 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 Prometheus
Pros of RRDtool
  • 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
  • 6
    Do one thing and do it well

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Cons of Prometheus
Cons of RRDtool
  • 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
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    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 RRDtool?

    RRDtool lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period.

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    Blog Posts

    Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

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    What are some alternatives to Prometheus and RRDtool?
    Datadog
    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
    Grafana
    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.
    New Relic
    The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
    InfluxDB
    InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. It has a built-in HTTP API so you don't have to write any server side code to get up and running. InfluxDB is designed to be scalable, simple to install and manage, and fast to get data in and out.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    See all alternatives