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InfluxDB vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Introduction:

InfluxDB and Prometheus are both popular time series databases that are widely used in the industry for collecting and analyzing metrics and time series data. While they serve similar purposes, there are several key differences between InfluxDB and Prometheus that set them apart from each other.

  1. Data Model: InfluxDB follows a schema-less data model, where data can be written without requiring a predefined schema. On the other hand, Prometheus follows a predefined schema data model with specific metric names, labels, and values. This gives InfluxDB more flexibility in handling dynamic and diverse data, while Prometheus provides more structured and standardized data.

  2. Query Language: InfluxDB uses its own query language called InfluxQL, which is similar to SQL and allows for complex querying operations. On the other hand, Prometheus uses a query language called PromQL, which is specifically designed for time series data and allows for aggregations, filtering, and mathematical operations. This difference in query languages makes each database more suitable for different types of data analysis and reporting.

  3. Scalability and Performance: InfluxDB is designed to be highly scalable and performant, with efficient storage and retrieval mechanisms. It can handle large volumes of time series data with millions of data points. On the other hand, Prometheus is designed to be more lightweight and suitable for smaller deployments. While Prometheus can handle moderate workloads efficiently, it may struggle with very high data ingestion rates or large-scale deployments.

  4. Data Retention Policies: InfluxDB provides flexible and customizable data retention policies, allowing users to define how long data should be retained based on their specific requirements. This can be useful for managing storage costs and complying with data retention regulations. On the other hand, Prometheus does not have built-in data retention policies and relies on external systems or manual cleanup to manage data retention.

  5. Ecosystem and Integrations: InfluxDB has a rich ecosystem with many integrations, including telegraf for collecting data, Grafana for visualization, and Kapacitor for real-time data processing and alerting. Prometheus also has a growing ecosystem and integrates well with Grafana for visualization and Alertmanager for alerting. However, Prometheus has native integration with Kubernetes, making it a popular choice for monitoring containerized environments.

  6. Monitoring Approach: InfluxDB is primarily focused on being a time series database for storing and querying metrics and time series data. It provides granular and detailed insights into the data. On the other hand, Prometheus is designed to be a full-fledged monitoring system, with features like service discovery, dynamic configuration, and alerting. It provides a comprehensive view of the health and performance of the monitored systems.

In Summary, InfluxDB and Prometheus differ in their data models, query languages, scalability, data retention policies, ecosystems, and monitoring approaches, catering to different use cases and requirements in the field of metrics and time series data management.

Advice on InfluxDB and Prometheus
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 832.1K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 617.7K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

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.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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

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Needs advice
on
InfluxDBInfluxDBMongoDBMongoDB
and
TimescaleDBTimescaleDB

We are building an IOT service with heavy write throughput and fewer reads (we need downsampling records). We prefer to have good reliability when comes to data and prefer to have data retention based on policies.

So, we are looking for what is the best underlying DB for ingesting a lot of data and do queries easily

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Replies (3)
Yaron Lavi
Recommends
on
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL

We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale, and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us a We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us better performance by far.

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Recommends
on
DruidDruid

Druid is amazing for this use case and is a cloud-native solution that can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure or on Kubernetes. - Easy to scale horizontally - Column Oriented Database - SQL to query data - Streaming and Batch Ingestion - Native search indexes It has feature to work as TimeSeriesDB, Datawarehouse, and has Time-optimized partitioning.

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Ankit Malik
Software Developer at CloudCover · | 3 upvotes · 351.4K views
Recommends
on
Google BigQueryGoogle BigQuery

if you want to find a serverless solution with capability of a lot of storage and SQL kind of capability then google bigquery is the best solution for that.

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Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogInfluxDBInfluxDB
and
PrometheusPrometheus

So, I am working in a big company where they have multiple different microservices running that are written in Golang. I am currently searching for a technology that can give me all the metric data from the microservices. What time-series databases would you recommend? or which databases would you recommend to further investigate? I appreciate any input.

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
InfluxDBInfluxDB

Each of these tools can help you with micro service workload and work well. I will try to go through some good, bad and ugly of each.

Datadog has an easy setup and time to get something tangible out of it. The cost model is by host so this is something to take into consideration how it will affect your use case. Also as a large organization at some point you will probably want control over some/all of your telemetry data to run your own ML or AI processes. With Datadog you this can be difficult as you will need to create processes outside of its closed eco system to get Raw metrics.

Prometheus is a great tool. It also has a fairly straight forward setup especially with Kubernetes. If you are running your micro services in k8s then this is going to get used one way or another; it is a first class citizen there with heavy utilization of K8s API. I also like the fact that Kubernetes architecture is easy to understand and that it utilizes Grafana for the visualization engine. Prometheus at scale can be done but it is a pain. Especially with a distributed infrastructure across multiple workloads.

Influxdb (TICK stack in v1) is known for its scalability and flexibility as a time series database. Telegraf is the main input/data-forwarder of the architecture and is completely decoupled from the database as are the other 3 components of the stack. Influx has made it very easy to just use one component on its own. I have worked on stacks that just used telegraf for ingestion into Kinesis or another data stream. I have also worked on stacks that used Influx database but used a different ETL process for analyzing the data in realtime instead of using their v1 architectures Kapacitor query engine. Influx database is a great performing time series database that in version 2 runs within kubernetes and utilizes Flux as the query language. Flux is a nice query language that is fairly easy to learn and has a lot of flexibility. As a last positive note Telegraf is written in Go so that would fit well with your current team.

The difficulties of Influx are that it is hard to get something really tangible out of it. Initial time to see something is fast but all the other work involved is a lot. You also have to understand the architecture well. The management of Influx can be cumbersome but it can scale up better than the other two when Datadogs cost is taken into consideration. They have a lot of API hooks in their V1 enterprise edition to wire and configure it. They do offer a mange service to offload this cost until later.

My overall choice here is probably to go with some of the influx as you can rip and/or add components as needed into the flow. Eventually you will probably want to run an ML process within there (can be done within Kapacitor but of course can also use your cloud provider here too) and this gives you the flexibility to do it anywhere. I would still go through prometheus because you will most likely use it also, but it does have forwarders to Influxdb so still fits.

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Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

We're running Prometheus/Alertmanager/Grafana across our whole company for any monitoring and metrics requirement, from the infrastructure layer all the way up to Springboot endpoint services, the prometheus exporter / scraping approach works pretty well for us. It's really easy to setup and more importantly; to maintain it without much effort, all the Prometheus configs get automatically created through Terraform outputs and Ansible jobs. Combine it with Grafana and you're smiling.

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Dmitry Mukhin
Engineer at Uploadcare · | 2 upvotes · 13.4K views
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog
at

We're moving towards Prometheus from Datadog at this moment. Main driving force is TOC at the moment.

Datadog is great until it becomes too expensive.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 759.9K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

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.

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Decisions about InfluxDB and Prometheus
Benoit Larroque
Principal Engineer at Sqreen · | 2 upvotes · 144.4K views

I chose TimescaleDB because to be the backend system of our production monitoring system. We needed to be able to keep track of multiple high cardinality dimensions.

The drawbacks of this decision are our monitoring system is a bit more ad hoc than it used to (New Relic Insights)

We are combining this with Grafana for display and Telegraf for data collection

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Pros of InfluxDB
Pros of Prometheus
  • 59
    Time-series data analysis
  • 30
    Easy setup, no dependencies
  • 24
    Fast, scalable & open source
  • 21
    Open source
  • 20
    Real-time analytics
  • 6
    Continuous Query support
  • 5
    Easy Query Language
  • 4
    HTTP API
  • 4
    Out-of-the-box, automatic Retention Policy
  • 1
    Offers Enterprise version
  • 1
    Free Open Source version
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring

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Cons of InfluxDB
Cons of Prometheus
  • 4
    Instability
  • 1
    Proprietary query language
  • 1
    HA or Clustering is only in paid version
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
  • 2
    Written in Go
  • 2
    TLS is quite difficult to understand
  • 2
    Requires multiple applications and tools
  • 1
    Single point of failure

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