OpenCensus vs Prometheus

Overview

Prometheus

Stacks4.8K

Followers3.8K

Votes239

GitHub Stars61.1K

Forks9.9K

OpenCensus

Stacks644

Followers21

Votes0

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.

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Advice on Prometheus, OpenCensus

Raja Subramaniam

Aug 27, 2019

Needs adviceon

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Sysdig

We have Prometheus as a monitoring engine as a part of our stack which contains Kubernetes cluster, container images and other open source tools. Also, I am aware that Sysdig can be integrated with Prometheus but I really wanted to know whether Sysdig or sysdig+prometheus will make better monitoring solution.

779k views779k

Comments

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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.

869k views869k

Comments

Mat

Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud

Oct 30, 2019

Needs advice

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.

794k views794k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Prometheus	OpenCensus
Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.	It is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.
Dimensional data; Powerful queries; Great visualization; Efficient storage; Precise alerting; Simple operation	Standard wire protocols; Consistent APIs for handling trace and metric data
Statistics
GitHub Stars 61.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.9K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 4.8K	Stacks 644
Followers 3.8K	Followers 21
Votes 239	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 47 Powerful easy to use monitoring 38 Flexible query language 32 Dimensional data model 27 Alerts 23 Active and responsive community Cons 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	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Grafana	Stackdriver Datadog SignalFx Zipkin LightStep Jaeger Wavefront Solarwinds Postmates API Instana

What are some alternatives to Prometheus, OpenCensus?

New Relic

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

Datadog

Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

AppSignal

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

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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.