Ask HN: Prometheus vs. StatsD / Telegraf

5 points

5 years ago

I see a lot of people talk about Prometheus on here and speak about it as though it's the only metrics gathering solution. In this way, it really does seem like it has become the poster child of Hacker News and metrics gathering.

I've used both Prometheus and the Telegraf / StatsD solutions; and, for a very long time, I've disliked everything from the standard "bugs"[0] in Prometheus to the entire design philosophy of their pull vs Telegraf and similar's push methodology.

What is the collective's general stance on Prometheus vs Telegraf; and why does the collective tend to end up preferring one over the other?

[0] For example, Prometheus clients does tend to consider a counter that hasn't been incremented to exist, so if you have an error counter, the sudden existence of the error counter is how you find an error. The 'increase' is 0, though, because it went from not existing to a value of 1. Citation: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/1673

No, it's not technically a "bug", it's how it's designed; but, it speaks to how it's used and the work-arounds are unsatisfactory, in my opinion.

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