
Prometheus vs. Grafana vs. Graphite – A Feature Comparison - dvirp
https://www.loomsystems.com/single-post/2017/06/07/Prometheus-vs-Grafana-vs-Graphite---A-Feature-Comparison
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ipmb
Throwing Grafana in the mix seems strange. It is comparing apples and oranges.

Also, contrary to what the article says Grafana does alarms as of v4.0
[http://docs.grafana.org/alerting/notifications/](http://docs.grafana.org/alerting/notifications/)

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bogomipz
Indeed. Prometheus and Grafana are complimentary. In fact PromDash was
deprecated in favor of Grafana [1]:

"NOTE: PromDash is deprecated. We recommend Grafana for visualization of
Prometheus metrics nowadays, as it has native Prometheus support and is widely
adopted and powerful."

This seems like an odd oversight for a "comparison" article.

[1] [https://github.com/prometheus-
junkyard/promdash](https://github.com/prometheus-junkyard/promdash)

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aw3c2
Warning, throws a popup in your face to make you subscribe to their mail spam
and plays a sound to make you notice the fake chat having a message in the
corner.

Overall this is just a low effort linkbait article to build SEO.

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manigandham
This is definitely a clickbait SEO article but the "chat" isnt fake, it's a
service provided by intercom.io (and several other companies) to have live
chat on your site for visitors and customers to interact with quickly.
Thousands of sites have this now and it's a good feature to have.

~~~
ralfn
Yes. I generally use it to tell whoever is on the other side just how annoying
and misleading the chat ping sound was and the blinking of the tab title.
Intentionally trying to sound and look like a Facebook, Skype or Gmail
notification. Thats definitely not a dark pattern. The sort of company that
would use this isn't scammy at all.

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edejong
For a fair comparison, Grafana should have been with combined with InfluxDB,
which is sort of the default configuration. I've been using Grafana / InfluxDB
for a personal domotica project. Given that I run it on cheap virtualised
hardware, it's blazingly fast, extremely easy to use (for devs), intuitive and
many client libraries for InfluxDB exist (Scala, Java, Python, R, to name a
few).

Couple of restrictions:

\- It's best for the relationship: "time", "tag", "scalar". Multi-scalar
rendering is possible using a plugin, but it's not designed for it.

\- Density plots are not supported yet. Limited support for heatmaps.

\- Due to JSON serialisation, server-side compression is definitely necessary.
With zopfli, I've seen compression to below 3%. This, however, entails a
(limited) CPU load.

\- Retention and aggregation in influxdb are possible, but it's best to design
this upfront.

~~~
gtrubetskoy
> combined with InfluxDB, which is sort of the default configuration

I'd say the "default" or most common configuration is still Graphite + Statsd
+ Grafana.

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fortytw2
What a... confused comparison? Most prometheus deployments _use_ grafana for
their visualization needs...

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gmjosack
Prometheus even recommends it.

[https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/grafana/](https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/grafana/)

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btmiller
The author's misunderstanding of role and function of these tools played a big
part in their declared winners of each section. I'd say on the whole that this
comparison article is useless.

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floatboth
"This is where Graphite wins over Grafana. Graphite can store time series
obtained from other sources (normally, direct monitoring tools) and provide a
query language to obtain the stored data. Again, Grafana can be used with
Graphite in order to visualize the data stored on its storage backend."

> Graphite wins over Grafana

> Grafana can be used with Graphite

> wins over

> can be used with

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camel_gopher
Surprised to see this from a CTO. Shows a lack of technical understanding in
time series dbs, visualizations, and alerting​.

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mmartinson
These comparisons don't really make sense. I just spent a decent chunk of time
evaluating the current state of these tools for implementation in a new
product, and seeing a comparison of the prom + grafana toolchain with the
comparable Influx DB toolchain would have been way more useful.

If anyone is in the middle of this decision, I went with Prometheus and my
early experience has been positive. It seems either would have been a good
choice though, and the existence of a decent instrumentation library in
language I'm using ended up being the deciding factor.

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akerro
This website is completely broken while scrolling. Does anyone else this
stretching effect?

~~~
devrandomguy
The React app that parses content from JSON to HTML (whyyyy?) also injects ~60
dynamic style elements (:facepalm:). Not sure whether to blame the Wix
framework their app uses, or the site itself.

You would think that people who write comparisons of time-series analytics
tools, and put effort into SEO, would profile and optimize their site. I hope
Google buries them for their load time.

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zozos
Shouldn't Prometheus be compared to InfluxDB?

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optimuspaul
+1

I was going to say Prometheus vs Graphite vs InfluxDB would be an interesting
comparison.

~~~
bbrazil
If you just want to compare the database aspects that works. Once you get into
other features that gets messier as functionality is split across components
in different ways.

For example Prometheus vs InfluxDB is not a great comparison, whereas
Prometheus+Alertmanager vs InfluxDB+Kapacitor is.

[https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/)
has such a comparison, though it's a few months out of date.

[Disclaimer: Prometheus developer]

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majewsky
Another case of a simple blog being so horribly overengineered that it throws
"Some elements on this page did not load. Refresh your site & try again." in
my face after loading 230 (!!) javascripts for over 10 seconds.

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anaclet0
"Grafana can only visualize time series and it excels in this task over all
other, but neither alarm management nor event tracking are part of its core
functionality"

This is false, grafana introduced alerting last year.

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mugsie
Yeah - all of the "suggestions" are a bit weird. For example they say not use
Grafana for OpenStack, to use Gnocchi instead.

Gnocchi supports Grafana as a UI. (as do all of the other tools even mentioned
on the page)

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pvelagal
This is a weird comparison. Grafana + InfluxDB is quite powerful. No mention
of InfluxDB at all.

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rodionos
Apples-Oranges-Apples

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davidone
What about Bosun?

