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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

#61

Post by darkwater »

INTPenis wrote: post #34
cfors wrote: post #19

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…

What issues have you seen with Grafana alerting? I'm curious because in my view it works so well that we abandoned alertmanager for Grafana alerts only well before v8.

How did you define alarms as code in a practical way before v8? and after?

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

#62

Post by AndyNemmity »

netingle wrote: post #57
AndyNemmity wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but why? I am using Thanos today. It works, it's complex, when it breaks, it's a bit of a challenge to fix, but it happens. It doesn't break often. It does the job. Mimir, which is based on Cortex, using either Mimir, or Cortex, what benefit am I getting? I get asked every few months about moving off of Thanos to Cortex, and today now Mimir, and I don't have any substantial reason to do so. It feels like moving…

Sounds like Thanos is working well for you, so in your position I wouldn't change anything. There are a bunch of other reasons why people might choose Mimir; perhaps they have out grown some of the scalability limits, or perhaps they want faster high cardinality queries, or a different take on multi-tenancy. Do remember Cortex (on which Mimir is based) predates Thanos as a project; Thanos was started to pursue a diff…

That's fair, thanks for the input. The only reason we implemented Thanos in the first place was a particular feature that we needed at the time of implementation. Now using it in an extremely large environment, I haven't seen any scalability limits. Speed of queries isn't a driver of anything.

Multi Tenancy certainly is, but we have our own custom multi tenancy solution over top of it we built ourselves. I'd like to get rid of that ultimately, but we're not utilizing whatever multi tenant features exist at the moment. Perhaps that will be a driver.

Appreciate your thoughts.

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

#63

Post by pracucci »

firstSpeaker wrote: post #60

How does it work with Rules? So far I cannot see if this can be a replacement for prometheus since I cannot see how can we re-use our prometheus rules with Mimir. Anyone knows anything around that?

Mimir includes a ruler component, which is responsibile to evaluate Prometheus recording and alerting rules. It also exposes a set of APIs to configure the rule groups.

For example, you can use this API to upload a rule group: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/refere...

Mimir is released with a CLI tool called "mimirtool" which, among other things, allow you to configure the rule groups (under the hood, it calls the Mimir API). Mimirtool documentation is here: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/tools/...

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

#64

Post by pracucci »

eatonphil wrote: post #23
pracucci wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cool! Personally I don't like watching videos, preferring to read prose or code or see an arch diagram. But good that it's available.

I'm the author of the video, but personally I also prefer to read prose instead of watching videos!

The architecture is covered here: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/archit...

There's also an hands-on tutorial here: https://grafana.com/tutorials/play-with-grafana-mimir/

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

#65

Post by tarun_anand »

vineeth0297 wrote: post #59
MindTooth wrote: post #26

How does this compare to https://www.timescale.com/promscale I’m looking into choosing a backend for my metrics and always open for suggestions.

Hey! Promscale PM here :) Promscale is the open source observability backend for metrics and traces powered by SQL. Whereas Mimir/Cortex is designed only for metrics. Key differences: 1. Promscale is light in architecture as all you need is Promscale connector + TimescaleDB to store and analyse metrics, traces where as Cortex comes with highly scalable micro-services architecture this requires deploying 10's of servi…

Thanks... how do we do reporting/dashboards/alerts with Promscale?

Also, any performance benchmarks?

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

#68

Post by alrlroipsp »

krnlpnc wrote: post #44
netingle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not seeing a comparison to Thanos

Why would you? Parent says its a comparison of Mimir and Cortex.

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

#69

Post by pracucci »

vineeth0297 wrote: post #59
MindTooth wrote: post #26

How does this compare to https://www.timescale.com/promscale I’m looking into choosing a backend for my metrics and always open for suggestions.

Hey! Promscale PM here :) Promscale is the open source observability backend for metrics and traces powered by SQL. Whereas Mimir/Cortex is designed only for metrics. Key differences: 1. Promscale is light in architecture as all you need is Promscale connector + TimescaleDB to store and analyse metrics, traces where as Cortex comes with highly scalable micro-services architecture this requires deploying 10's of servi…

Hi. I'm a Mimir maintainer. I don't have hands-on/production experience with Promscale, so I can't speak about it. I'm chiming in just to add a note about the Mimir deployment modes.

> Cortex comes with highly scalable micro-services architecture this requires deploying 10's of services like ingestor, distributor, querier, etc.

Mimir also supports the monolithic deployment mode. It's about deploying the whole Mimir as a single unit (eg. a Kubernetes StatefulSet) which you then scale out adding more replicas.

More details here: https://grafana.com/docs/mimir/latest/operators-guide/archit...

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

#70

Post by Bad_CRC »

INTPenis wrote: post #34
cfors wrote: post #19

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…

What issues have you seen with Grafana alerting? I'm curious because in my view it works so well that we abandoned alertmanager for Grafana alerts only well before v8.

No alerts possible with dashboards and variables.
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