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Comment by buck4roo | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget Prometheus (clone of borgmon by ex-SRE)

There is no way to perceive Prometheus as Google falling behind, though. It's more of a lesson about the perverse willingness of the public to subject themselves to terrible technologies that Google began deprecating years ago.

Why is Prometheus terrible? It's pretty cool.

At small scale it's fine. Its architecture totally forecloses any possibility of distributed evaluation, so there is a brick wall of scalability. Its human-readable-text-over-HTTP scraping scheme is also hilariously inefficient. It is not, in short, "planet scale".

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol13/p3181-adams.pdf

Well, I get the point of Google not falling behind with their tech, but even most Google competitors aren't working at Google scale.

For Prometheus they could have just chosen to aim for smaller businesses, since that's 99% of businesses out here.

So it could just be a tradeoff.

Well, to be fair, they are offering Prometheus as a service, and they built it as a façade upon Monarch, which pretty convincingly demonstrates the superiority of Monarch.

I just find a kind of perverse humor in the fact that outside google Prometheus is viewed as alien technology - it even has that condescending name - but inside Google borgmon was considered the punch line of memes and/or a hazing ritual.

IIRC, a core point in early days of Prometheus was a greatly simplified system that built on some of the same ideas, but without the parts that made it into punch line of memes or a hazing ritual for new guys.

While the text based metrics aren't best, they are a reasonable compromise, and I found that it provides a good enough common interface where if needed I can change what collects from it later on.

Are there better options? SURE! I can, however, usually get my 80% of the problem solved with Prometheus integration and worry about scaling later.

human-readable-text-over-HTTP is planet scalable

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