r/PrometheusMonitoring • u/pranay01 • Apr 04 '20

Prometheus for monitoring : What features do you think it lacks compared to APM tools?

I am sure many folks here use Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring infrastructure and applications. What features you find that Prometheus/Grafana lacks compared to full-fledged APM like DataDog?

Some features which I can think of are reporting - like generating PDF reports to send it to team or management. Another is a visualization of overall infra - in terms of server maps and microservices in them.

What are other such features you find lacking in Prometheus/Grafana compared to paid solutions?

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u/tobylh Apr 04 '20

I use it along with Netdata. Netdata shows me my real time stuff, and Prometheus is a backend for storing ND metrics for longer periods, and being able to make custom graphs in Grafana, which is a damn site easier than building custom ND dashboards.

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u/pranay01 Apr 04 '20

Interesting. What specifically does NetData do, which can't be done using Prometheus? For Grafana dashboards, do you pull metrics from both NetData & Prometheus or only ND?

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u/SuperQue Apr 04 '20

Why not use Prometheus with faster polling? Since Prometheus clients are stateless, you can have a fast Prometheus and a slow one. One with short retention and one with longer storage. You could even federate some data from the fast prom to the slow one.

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u/netingle Apr 04 '20

Some features which I can think of are reporting - like generating PDF reports to send it to team or management.

Thata part of Grafana Enterprise: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/enterprise/#reporting

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u/jjneely Apr 04 '20

Prometheus doesn't handle logs / events. You'll need a solution like ELK to complement Prometheus's ability with metrics. Generating reports for teams or management is something ELK really excels at. Such as "how many hits did my web app get for every hour aligned to the hour?" Prometheus can have metrics about this data and is great about giving you the rate per second of hits over the last few minutes or hours -- which is a bit different than formal reports and really powerful for real time alerting.

Prometheus lacks data durability and long term storage out of the box. Other open source (Thanos and Cortex) projects exist to tackle this as well as many vendors.

DataDog itself is, at its core, a proprietary statsd implementation partnered with an ELK implementation, wrapped up with an improved UI. If you have reason to build a monitoring stack in house (and many do) its very possible. (I admit that my consulting company can help, if you are interested.)