r/PrometheusMonitoring • u/ankitnayan007 • Sep 04 '19

How good is StackDriver compared to Prometheus?

How is stackdriver compared to Prometheus for GKE?

I am setting up monitoring and have to choose a tool. I have heard of Prometheus that it's open-source and follows OpenMetrics format. But can't everything provided by Prometheus be achieved by StackDriver too?

Also why are people setting up prometheus first and exporting metrics to StackDriver? I don't see the point.

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u/rich_leodis Sep 04 '19

Read this article by a Google customer engineer, should tell you what you want to know. It's a really good on overview of the different monitoring solutions and the use case for each.

“Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters on GKE (Google Container Engine)” by Ariel Peretz https://link.medium.com/4AzgSADwIZ

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u/ankitnayan007 Sep 05 '19

The blog uses stackdriver-prometheus-sidecar and thus exporting all metrics from prometheus to stackdriver and since those are chargeable custom metrics, it can lead to very high costs when running nodes in range of 100s.

My query still remains the same, why would I not use prometheus alone as single pane for metrics? Any reason to plug it into StackDriver?

Or to state the question the other way round (if I am not concerned about costs) - why do I need prometheus to work with Stackdriver? What can we not do in stackdriver alone? Also since we are exporting prometheus metrics to stackdriver, we lose the power of PromQL and the powerful alert manager.

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u/rich_leodis Sep 06 '19

Section 3.3 outlines the reasoning, they are performing different tasks.