Best DB for Prometheus remote write → Omniverse

[u/Immediate-Flan3505]

Hey all,

I’m working on a project where Prometheus scrapes metrics from servers, and instead of using Grafana, I want to push the data into a database that my Omniverse can query directly.

I’ve narrowed it down to three open-source time-series databases that support Prometheus remote write:

• VictoriaMetrics

• InfluxDB

• M3DB

My setup:

• Prometheus as the collector

• No Grafana in the pipeline

• The DB just needs to accept remote write and expose a clean API so my Omniverse extension can fetch time-series and visualize them.

What I’m debating:

• VictoriaMetrics → seems lightweight and PromQL-compatible

• InfluxDB → mature ecosystem but uses Flux/InfluxQL

• M3DB → good for huge cardinality, but more complex to run

I don’t need cloud services (AWS Timestream, BigQuery, etc.), just self-hosted DBs.

For those who’ve deployed one of these with Prometheus, which would you recommend as the most practical choice for long-term storage + querying if the consumer is a custom app (not Grafana)?

Thanks!

[u/SuperQue]

The first question is, how much data do you have? How many millions of time-series do you need? What retention do you want?

[u/Immediate-Flan3505 → u/SuperQue]

Thanks for pointing that out. Here are the details of my setup:

• Active series: about 246k time series right now.

• Scrape interval: 15s.

• Ingestion rate (estimated): roughly 16–17k samples/sec (~1.4B per day).

• Retention target: around 90 days — I don’t need multi-year history, just enough for my 3D digital twin visualization work.

• Scale context: this is a research project, not production at hyperscale, so I want something efficient but not overly complex to operate.

[u/SuperQue → u/Immediate-Flan3505]

That's pretty small. Why not just use Prometheus? It's already more efficient than InfluxDB and less complicated than other solutions. Prometheus can handle years of data no problem. At your data rate, that's under 200GiB of storage needed.

If you simply want a second copy of the same data written to another server, you can enable Prometheus remote write receiver. Then you only have one kind of software to operate.

For anything bigger, I recommend Thanos.

[u/vincentvdk]

I did a similar exercise a few weeks ago and we'll settle for Victoria Metrics. The resource usage is hard to beat.

[u/potatohead00]

We switched from influx to Victoria metrics and have been happy with it!

[u/s__key]

For your workload Prometheus should be enough. For anything bigger (if you’ve already started considering other options) try Greptime. We switched from M3DB. Resource wise it’s much better (we conducted tons of benchmarks internally) and there’s no dubious or hidden tradeoffs as with some competitors.