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Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

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Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#61

Post by lima »

ciguy wrote: post #59
carlosdp wrote: post #46

Gotta say though, having rolled grafana and prometheus and such on my own plenty of times before, if you are a startup and can afford Datadog, use Datadog.

This is good advice, however you will also want to make sure you have a plan to get off datadog when you grow. Datadog is one of the easiest to use and most comprehensive out of the box. But it gets really expensive as you begin to scale up and add servers, cloud accounts, services etc.... At a certain scale, rolling your own monitoring and alerting becomes cost effective again as Datadog begins to charge an arm and…

We migrated customers off DataDog for this exact reason.

Rolling a custom Prometheus / Grafana / Alertmanager setup is not hard at all, more powerful, and it's much easier to do it right from the start.

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#62

Post by avthar »

Echoing the sentiment expressed by others here, for a scalable time-series database that continues to invest in its community and plays well with others, please check out TimescaleDB.

We (I work at TimescaleDB) recently announced that multi-node TimescaleDB will be available for free, specifically as a way to keep investing in our community: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/multi-node-petabyte-scale-ti...

Today TimescaleDB outperforms InfluxDB across almost all dimensions (credit goes to our database team!), especially for high-cardinality workloads: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-...

TimescaleDB also works with Grafana, Prometheus, Telegraf, Kafka, Apache Spark, Tableau, Django, Rails, anything that speaks SQL...

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#63

Post by dspillett »

cbzbc wrote: post #12
dahfizz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably system requirements matter more for small scale deployments. I shouldn't need a server with multiple SSD volumes and 8GB+ ram just to monitor a couple raspberry pi's. EDIT: okay, I get it. You don't need 8GB ram. I was just going by the hardware requirements in their docs: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.8/introduction/insta...

You don't need 8GB ram to run a small scale deployment of influxdb.

I'm sure this is true, but the documentation does explicitly say "Each machine should have a minimum of 8GB RAM" with absolutely no caveats about scale, so I think people can be forgiven for taking a quick look and moving on because they don't want to provision that.

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#64

Post by edoceo »

dharmab wrote: post #60
Hates_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know a bit of detail as we're looking into Grafana/Promethus a bit.

Prometheus is a very needy child in terms of data volume and hardware resources. Running it is at least one engineers' full time job- if you're a startup, you can outsource monitoring for a tiny fraction of the price, then move to Prometheus later if you are successful.

My company's Prometheus setup was super easy, one $10/mo box. About 1 week of fiddling all the exporters and configs but now it just runs and has for months.

You can be small with Prometheus and grow into needing an FTE for it - w/o having the migration hurdle of moving out-source to in-source

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#65

Post by lima »

dharmab wrote: post #60
Hates_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know a bit of detail as we're looking into Grafana/Promethus a bit.

Prometheus is a very needy child in terms of data volume and hardware resources. Running it is at least one engineers' full time job- if you're a startup, you can outsource monitoring for a tiny fraction of the price, then move to Prometheus later if you are successful.

Please elaborate - how is it one engineer's full time job?

We run Prometheus in production and this hasn't been our experience at all.

A single machine can easily handle hundreds of thousands of time series, performance is good, and maintaining the alerting rules is a shared responsibility for the entire team (as it should be).

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#66

Post by Axsuul »

carlosdp wrote: post #46

Gotta say though, having rolled grafana and prometheus and such on my own plenty of times before, if you are a startup and can afford Datadog, use Datadog.

As a counterpoint: I have been rolling my own Grafana/Prometheus for many years for my startup and it's been pretty trivial

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#67

Post by mhall119 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #7
overcast wrote: post #3

Really, REALLY tried to love InfluxDB. But its systems requirements, performance, and features are poor compared to things like TimescaleDB.

Influx is really shitting the bed with how they're handling the InfluxDB 2.0 release. The docs are a mess, and the migration tool seems like the result of a weekend hackathon. They're leaving a lot of customers with long term metrics in a tough spot. If you're thinking about using Influx for long term data storage, look elsewhere. The company continuously burns customer goodwill by going against the grain, and buckin…

Just to add to what Ryan already said, we don't plan on dropping support for InfluxDB 1.x anytime soon, and will continue to improve the migration path from 1.x to 2.0, so you won't have to upgrade until it's right for you.

Now of course our goal is to help everyone upgrade to 2.0 and beyond, but we know that we made a lot of changes and improvements in 2.0, this isn't a minor upgrade. We will focus first on what we need to do to help 80% of our users upgraded, then the next 80%, and so on, until we've got you all covered.

Meanwhile new users can benefit from starting off on 2.0 as soon as it's available (or get the beta which is already out) and not have to wait.

(Source: I'm the Community Manager for InfluxData)

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#68

Post by dijit »

carlosdp wrote: post #46

Gotta say though, having rolled grafana and prometheus and such on my own plenty of times before, if you are a startup and can afford Datadog, use Datadog.

I just costed a datadog deployment (based on your comment) and it would cost me my yearly salary every month.

No thanks. :/

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#69

Post by speedgoose »

x87678r wrote: post #28

I love prometheus. Its simple and the built in charts are enough without having to use Grafana on top.

I don't. It's quite difficult to do complex queries and its query language has a few gotcha. I think it's quite good and one of the best solutions today, but I look forward to something as simple and as fast, but with a proper query language.

Re: Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD

#70

Post by zytek »

VictoriaMetrics eats other TSDBs for breakfast.

PromQL support (with extensions) and clustered / HA mode. Great storage efficiency. Plays well for monitoring multiple k8s clusters, works great with Grafana, pretty easily deployed on k8s.

No affiliation, just a happy user.

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