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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

So, just so you understand where our heads are at: we want our users to light their apps up with lots of Prometheus metrics. Then we want them to be able to pop up a free-mode Grafana Cloud site, aim it at our API, add a dashboard, start typing a metric name and have it autocomplete to all possible metrics.

That pretty much works now?

I see the ideological purity case you two are making for "true Prometheus", but it is not at all clear to me how doing a purer version of Prometheus would make any of our users happier.

What am I missing?

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> That pretty much works now?

Well, with the requisite glue code that would inform each user's Prometheus instance how to scrape the service instances -- yes, more or less.

> is not at all clear to me how doing a purer version of Prometheus would make any of our users happier.

If the only things you care about when you build systems are "works" and "direct impact on customers" then there's not really a point to this conversation. The things I'm speaking about, the architectural soundness of a distributed system, are largely orthogonal to those metrics, at least to the first derivative.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your meaning when you wrote "That pretty much works now?" — I thought it was a question as to whether a more traditional Prom architecture could do it, but I see now you're just saying you already have this set up.

Right. But also: I'm not trying to be dismissive. We both know that we're looking at this through different lenses. I'm genuinely curious how your lens could inform mine; like, is there something I'm missing? Where, by deploying a much more conventional Prometheus architecture, I could somehow make our users happier? I don't see it, but I'm a dummy; if there's something for me to learn, I'm happy to learn it.

I'm pretty confident that the end result would be simpler in an architectural sense (i.e. fewer components), it would be easier to understand and maintain, and it would behave both more predictably and more reliably.

But these are subjective claims! Not everyone thinks the same way!

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