Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
OpenCensus vs Prometheus: What are the differences?
Introduction
OpenCensus and Prometheus are both monitoring tools used in the field of software development. Although they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two.
Data Collection Architecture: OpenCensus is an agent-based monitoring system that requires installing and configuring agents on the host machine, which then collect and export metrics to monitoring backends. On the other hand, Prometheus is a standalone monitoring server that scrapes and collects metrics directly from instrumented targets using HTTP calls.
Data Storage: OpenCensus does not provide its own storage solution and relies on various supported backends like Elasticsearch or Prometheus for storing and querying the metrics data. Prometheus, on the other hand, has its own time-series database for storing metrics data, which allows for efficient querying and analysis.
Data Model: OpenCensus uses a flexible model where metrics can have different data types such as counters, gauges, or histograms. It also supports custom metrics definitions. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a fixed data model with only a single data type called "metric". It provides more advanced features like labels and dimensions to enable slicing and dicing of metrics data.
Query Language: OpenCensus does not have its own query language and relies on the query capabilities of the backend storage system being used. Prometheus, on the other hand, has its own powerful query language called PromQL, which allows for complex queries and aggregations over the collected metrics data.
Alerting: OpenCensus does not provide built-in alerting capabilities and relies on integration with other alerting systems like Prometheus Alertmanager or third-party solutions. Prometheus, on the other hand, has built-in support for defining and executing alerting rules based on the collected metrics data.
Ecosystem Integration: OpenCensus has a broader ecosystem integration with support for multiple programming languages and frameworks. It provides language-specific SDKs and libraries to instrument applications in various languages. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a strong focus on integration with Kubernetes and is widely used in the Kubernetes ecosystem for monitoring.
In Summary, OpenCensus and Prometheus differ in their data collection architecture, data storage, data model, query language, alerting capabilities, and ecosystem integration.
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 OpenCensus
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of OpenCensus
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
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is OpenCensus?
What is Prometheus?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use OpenCensus?
What companies use Prometheus?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with OpenCensus?
What tools integrate with Prometheus?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+11
+12
+14
+6+26