Overview

Stackdriver

Stacks319

Followers349

Votes67

Prometheus

Stacks4.4K

Followers3.8K

Votes239

GitHub Stars61.1K

Forks9.9K

Prometheus vs Stackdriver: What are the differences?

Prometheus vs Stackdriver

Prometheus and Stackdriver are two popular monitoring and observability tools used to gain insights into the performance and health of applications and infrastructure. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences between the two.

Data Collection: Prometheus operates on a pull-based model where it scrapes metrics from various targets, such as applications and servers, at regular intervals. On the other hand, Stackdriver follows a push-based model where applications and services send their metrics to Stackdriver for processing.
Data Storage: Prometheus stores data in a time-series database, allowing for efficient querying and analysis. It provides a rich query language and retains data for a configurable period. In contrast, Stackdriver relies on Google Cloud storage and BigQuery for the storage and analysis of its data, making it more suitable for users already operating within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Alerting and Notifications: Prometheus offers a flexible and powerful alerting system that allows users to define custom alerting rules and send notifications based on metric thresholds. Stackdriver also provides alerting capabilities but integrates more seamlessly with other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Pub/Sub, for advanced alerting and notification mechanisms.
Integration and Ecosystem: Prometheus has a thriving open-source community, which has led to the creation of numerous integrations and exporters supporting various technologies and frameworks. Stackdriver, being a Google Cloud product, offers seamless integration with other Google Cloud services, including log management, tracing, and error reporting, providing a unified observability experience within the Google Cloud Platform.
Pricing: Prometheus is an open-source project, making it free to use and deploy. Users have full control over their infrastructure and incur only the costs associated with running and managing their Prometheus servers. Stackdriver, on the other hand, offers different pricing tiers based on the features and usage, with some basic functionality being available for free. Additional costs may be incurred for advanced features, increased storage, and usage beyond the free tier.
Scalability and Performance: Prometheus is known for its scalability, allowing users to scale horizontally by adding multiple instances. It can handle vast amounts of data and high ingestion rates efficiently. Stackdriver also offers scalability, leveraging the Google Cloud infrastructure, allowing users to handle large volumes of data. Stackdriver benefits from Google's extensive network and capacity for processing vast amounts of data in real-time.

In summary, the key differences between Prometheus and Stackdriver lie in their data collection models, storage mechanisms, alerting capabilities, integrations, pricing, and scalability. Prometheus provides users with greater flexibility and control, while Stackdriver offers tight integration with the Google Cloud Platform and advanced features suited for users already operating within that ecosystem.

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Advice on Stackdriver, Prometheus

Raja Subramaniam

Aug 27, 2019

Needs adviceon

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Sysdig

We have Prometheus as a monitoring engine as a part of our stack which contains Kubernetes cluster, container images and other open source tools. Also, I am aware that Sysdig can be integrated with Prometheus but I really wanted to know whether Sysdig or sysdig+prometheus will make better monitoring solution.

779k views779k

Comments

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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.

868k views868k

Comments

Mat

Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud

Oct 30, 2019

Needs advice

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.

794k views794k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Stackdriver	Prometheus
Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.	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.
Monitoring;Logging;Diagnostics;Application Tracing;Error Reporting;Alerting;Uptime Monitoring;Multi-cloud;Production Debugger;	Dimensional data; Powerful queries; Great visualization; Efficient storage; Precise alerting; Simple operation
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 61.1K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 9.9K
Stacks 319	Stacks 4.4K
Followers 349	Followers 3.8K
Votes 67	Votes 239
Pros & Cons
Pros 19 Monitoring 11 Logging 8 Alerting 7 Tracing 6 Uptime Monitoring Cons 2 Not free	Pros 47 Powerful easy to use monitoring 38 Flexible query language 32 Dimensional data model 27 Alerts 23 Active and responsive community Cons 12 Just for metrics 6 Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints 6 Bad UI 4 Not easy to configure and use 3 Supports only active agents
Integrations
No integrations available	Grafana

What are some alternatives to Stackdriver, Prometheus?

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.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Amazon CloudWatch

It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).