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Dropwizard Metrics vs Prometheus: What are the differences?
Introduction
In website development, it is important to use monitoring and metrics tools to analyze and measure various aspects of the system's performance. Two popular metrics tools used in web development are Dropwizard Metrics and Prometheus. While both tools serve the purpose of monitoring and metrics, there are several key differences between them.
Data Collection Method: Dropwizard Metrics is a library that provides an abstraction layer for collecting application metrics. It allows developers to easily instrument their code and collect metrics using predefined metrics types such as counters, timers, and gauges. On the other hand, Prometheus has its own data collection method. It uses a pull model, where it scrapes metrics from application endpoints at regular intervals.
Data Processing: Dropwizard Metrics focuses on collecting and exposing application-level metrics. It provides lightweight and efficient metrics collection, aggregating data at runtime and offering a real-time view of system performance. Prometheus, on the other hand, collects raw data and performs complex data processing on the server side. It includes powerful query language and built-in functions to apply mathematical transformations on the collected data.
Data Storage: Dropwizard Metrics does not include its own data storage mechanism. It relies on external systems such as Graphite, Ganglia, or InfluxDB to store and visualize metrics data. Prometheus, however, comes with its own built-in time-series database for storing collected metrics. It provides long-term storage and retention of metrics data, enabling advanced querying and analysis.
Alerting and Monitoring: Prometheus has built-in support for alerting based on predefined alerting rules. It continuously evaluates these rules against the collected metrics and triggers alerts when certain conditions are met. Dropwizard Metrics does not have native support for alerting and relies on external tools or custom implementation for this capability.
Ecosystem and Integration: Dropwizard Metrics has a smaller ecosystem compared to Prometheus. It provides integrations with various monitoring systems and frameworks but does not have as many plugins and third-party integrations as Prometheus. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a wide range of integrations with popular systems and frameworks, making it easier to collect metrics from different sources.
Scalability: Dropwizard Metrics is designed to be lightweight and highly scalable, making it suitable for applications with high frequency of metric updates. Prometheus, on the other hand, can handle larger volumes of data and is more suitable for scenarios where scalability is a key requirement.
In summary, Dropwizard Metrics and Prometheus differ in terms of data collection method, data processing, data storage, alerting and monitoring capabilities, ecosystem and integration support, and scalability. These differences allow developers to choose the tool that best fits their specific monitoring and metrics requirements.
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.
You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.
Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.
Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?
What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?
Regards, Sunil.
If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.
Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.
Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose
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.
this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/
I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.
Pros of Dropwizard Metrics
Pros of Prometheus
- Powerful easy to use monitoring47
- Flexible query language38
- Dimensional data model32
- Alerts27
- Active and responsive community23
- Extensive integrations22
- Easy to setup19
- Beautiful Model and Query language12
- Easy to extend7
- Nice6
- Written in Go3
- Good for experimentation2
- Easy for monitoring1
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Cons of Dropwizard Metrics
Cons of Prometheus
- Just for metrics12
- Bad UI6
- Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints6
- Not easy to configure and use4
- Supports only active agents3
- Written in Go2
- TLS is quite difficult to understand2
- Requires multiple applications and tools2
- Single point of failure1