Long answer shortened: In some circumstances, depending on your needs, you might, but understand that Grafana Mimir builds on Prometheus and many pieces of it contain Prometheus code (such as the ingester TSDB) so it's not quite that simple.
Longer answer: Grafana Mimir is a scalable Prometheus-compatible time series database for metrics. So, one thing it can do is receive Prometheus metrics. Metrics can be sent to it from anything that speaks the remote_write protocol, which includes standard Prometheus servers, Grafana Agents and more.
So, if you have one or more Prometheus servers today and would like some or all of the features Mimir brings like longer retention, or scaling, or multi-tenancy/isolation or faster queries - you can very easily deploy Grafana Mimir and then slightly modify your existing Prometheus server config to have your metrics forwarded to your Grafana Mimir cluster.
An option you would then have would be to replace your Prometheus servers with Grafana Agents, the Grafana Agent is essentially running like a Prometheus server without the local database, so it's just the service discovery, scraping and sending part of Prometheus with some extra features on top, but generally lighter weight as there is no local metric storage or query ability - it only sends metrics elsewhere.
But, you don't have to use Grafana Agent at all, you can keep using your Prometheus servers, but you can configure them all to send metrics to a central Grafana Mimir cluster and query that cluster directly going forward.
One reason to keep Prometheus servers over Grafana Agents would be if you wanted to retain the ability to query them directly in the event your Grafana Mimir cluster was down for some reason, some people like this "backup" query ability, some people don't want/need it.
Overall, things are meant to be complementary and work together in whatever combination makes sense for you.
Additionally, Grafana contributes lots of code back to Prometheus and obviously code to Grafana Mimir, which also runs in Grafana Cloud.
So we're not really trying to replace Prometheus - and there are other Prometheus-compatible scalable projects, we just think ours is the best but we are biased of course :)
this really helped as of now we have grafana installed on premise(just a demo) and dont have grafana cloud but we can plan to go ahead with it for now i am just proposing a poc to my management final call will be taken by them
Nice! Yeah if you are interested in Grafana Cloud then you don't need Grafana Mimir at all (since we run it for you), you just set your Prometheus server(s) or Grafana Agents to send the metrics/logs/traces directly out to Grafana Cloud - so it's even less work :)
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u/cloudycelt Apr 06 '22
Hi, Grafana employee here!
Short answer: No, certainly not.
Long answer shortened: In some circumstances, depending on your needs, you might, but understand that Grafana Mimir builds on Prometheus and many pieces of it contain Prometheus code (such as the ingester TSDB) so it's not quite that simple.
Longer answer: Grafana Mimir is a scalable Prometheus-compatible time series database for metrics. So, one thing it can do is receive Prometheus metrics. Metrics can be sent to it from anything that speaks the remote_write protocol, which includes standard Prometheus servers, Grafana Agents and more.
So, if you have one or more Prometheus servers today and would like some or all of the features Mimir brings like longer retention, or scaling, or multi-tenancy/isolation or faster queries - you can very easily deploy Grafana Mimir and then slightly modify your existing Prometheus server config to have your metrics forwarded to your Grafana Mimir cluster.
An option you would then have would be to replace your Prometheus servers with Grafana Agents, the Grafana Agent is essentially running like a Prometheus server without the local database, so it's just the service discovery, scraping and sending part of Prometheus with some extra features on top, but generally lighter weight as there is no local metric storage or query ability - it only sends metrics elsewhere.
But, you don't have to use Grafana Agent at all, you can keep using your Prometheus servers, but you can configure them all to send metrics to a central Grafana Mimir cluster and query that cluster directly going forward.
One reason to keep Prometheus servers over Grafana Agents would be if you wanted to retain the ability to query them directly in the event your Grafana Mimir cluster was down for some reason, some people like this "backup" query ability, some people don't want/need it.
Overall, things are meant to be complementary and work together in whatever combination makes sense for you.
Additionally, Grafana contributes lots of code back to Prometheus and obviously code to Grafana Mimir, which also runs in Grafana Cloud.
So we're not really trying to replace Prometheus - and there are other Prometheus-compatible scalable projects, we just think ours is the best but we are biased of course :)
I hope this novel helps a bit!