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Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

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Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#11

Post by candiddevmike »

notamy wrote: post #4
eatonphil wrote: post #2

There isn't a link to the project on the page (that I could find) so it almost looked like it's not open source. But here it is: https://github.com/grafana/mimir .

You have to find the "Download" button and click it, it's very non-obvious :< The entire page seems to be designed to funnel you into signing up for their paid service, which makes sense, but still doesn't feel great...

Recently switched from their cloud service back to on-premise. The cloud version wasn't being updated and the entire setup experience left a lot to be desired with how you connect their on-premise grafana agent, especially if you aren't using their easy button deployment stuff. Also, billing for metrics is insane, as on any given day my metric load may vary between 5-7k or more. This caused some operational overhead as I was constantly tweaking scrapers to reduce useless metrics.

For $50/mo, you can self host everything easier, cheaper and with more control IMO.

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#12

Post by netingle »

nosequel wrote: post #8

Grafana Labs needs to make a convincing comparison chart of some kind between Mimir, Thanos, and Cortex. Thanos and Cortex are both mature projects and are both CNCF Incubating projects. Why would anyone switch to a new prometheus long-term storage solution from those? *EDIT* : I see from another reply there is a basic comparison to Cortex here: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/announcing-grafana-mimir... To the M…

I agree! Which is why I put one in the blog post ;-) https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/announcing-grafana-mimir...

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#13

Post by cett »

pracucci wrote: post #6
cett wrote: post #3

Presumably AGPLv3 is why Grafana would rather develop this than Cortex?

Hi. I'm Marco, I work at Grafana Labs and I'm a Grafana Mimir maintainer. We just published a couple of blog posts about the project, including more details on your question: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/announcing-grafana-mimir... and https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/qa-with-our-ceo-about-gr...

Thank you for your answer. That seems like a reasonable strategy.

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#15

Post by pracucci »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #5

How does this stack up with https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos , which I've used to pretty good success. The only criticism I have of Thanos though was the amount of moving pieces to maintain.

Mimir has a microservices architecture. However, Mimir supports two deployment modes: monolithic and microservices.

In monolithic mode you deploy Mimir as a single process and all microservices (Mimir components) run inside the same process. Then you scale it out running more replicas. Deployment modes are documented here: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/archit...

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#17

Post by bboreham »

eatonphil wrote: post #9

It's hard to tell exactly how this works but judging from the tutorial's docker-compose.yml [0] it looks like this runs as a separate API next to Prometheus and you tell Prometheus to write [1] to Mimir. I'm unclear how reads work from it or maybe there is no read? Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding. [0] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/docs/sources/tuto... [1] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/…

It’s a centralised multi-tenant store, supporting the Prometheus query API. So you can point clients directly at Mimir, they send in PromQL and they get data back in Json.

(Note I work on Mimir)

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#18

Post by eatonphil »

bboreham wrote: post #17
eatonphil wrote: post #9

It's hard to tell exactly how this works but judging from the tutorial's docker-compose.yml [0] it looks like this runs as a separate API next to Prometheus and you tell Prometheus to write [1] to Mimir. I'm unclear how reads work from it or maybe there is no read? Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding. [0] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/docs/sources/tuto... [1] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/…

It’s a centralised multi-tenant store, supporting the Prometheus query API. So you can point clients directly at Mimir, they send in PromQL and they get data back in Json. (Note I work on Mimir)

Is there an example of running mimir without prometheus?

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#19

Post by cfors »

More engineering effort going into reinventing things that already exist to upsell people on Grafana cloud.

What about focusing on the core value that Grafana provides, dashboards?

Grafana 8 alerting is still in my opinion at a beta level. Dashboards as code has made no meaningful progress outside of community attempts in the past 3 years. The documentation for Grafana 8 alerts is still subpar.

All of these things as a paid offering are more interesting than migrating my logging system or metrics system. Developers don't want to migrate their observability.

Re: Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus

#20

Post by pracucci »

eatonphil wrote: post #9

It's hard to tell exactly how this works but judging from the tutorial's docker-compose.yml [0] it looks like this runs as a separate API next to Prometheus and you tell Prometheus to write [1] to Mimir. I'm unclear how reads work from it or maybe there is no read? Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding. [0] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/docs/sources/tuto... [1] https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/…

Mimir exposes both remote write API and Prometheus compatible API. The typical setup is that you configure Prometheus (or Grafana Agent) to remote write to Mimir and then you configure Grafana (or your preferred query tool) to query metrics from Mimir.

You may also be interested into looking at a 5 minutes introduction video, where I cover the overall architecture too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej9y3KILV8g

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