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Prometheus vs Solarwinds: What are the differences?
Introduction
Prometheus and Solarwinds are two popular monitoring tools used in the IT industry. While both tools serve the purpose of monitoring and alerting, they have key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will delve into these differences and explore how they impact their usage and capabilities.
Data collection: Prometheus follows a pull-based model where it actively scrapes metrics from the configured targets using HTTP endpoints. On the other hand, Solarwinds employs a more traditional agent-based approach that uses agents to collect data from various systems and devices.
Data storage: Prometheus stores all data locally in a time-series database, making it self-contained and highly scalable. In contrast, Solarwinds usually relies on a separate database for storing collected data, which introduces an additional layer of complexity.
Query language: Prometheus utilizes its own query language called PromQL, which is specifically designed for querying time-series data. Solarwinds, on the other hand, supports a more generic SQL-based query language for data retrieval and analysis.
Alerting and notifications: Prometheus has built-in support for alerting and notification mechanisms. It allows users to define alerting rules and configure notification channels for timely alerts. Solarwinds also offers alerting and notification capabilities, but they may require additional configuration and setup.
Community support: Prometheus has a thriving open-source community that continuously contributes to its development and provides extensive documentation and support. Solarwinds, being a proprietary tool, relies on vendor support and documentation for assistance.
Pricing model: Prometheus is open-source and free to use, making it an attractive option for small to medium-sized organizations with budget constraints. In contrast, Solarwinds is a commercial tool with a pricing model based on licensing and the number of monitored elements, which may be a significant factor for larger enterprises.
In summary, Prometheus and Solarwinds differ in their data collection methods, storage mechanisms, query languages, alerting capabilities, community support, and pricing models. These differences make them suitable for different use cases and organizations' requirements.
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 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
Pros of Solarwinds
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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
Cons of Solarwinds
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