JesseBotApr 4, 2025

So, I've been using Thanos to receive and store my prometheus metrics long term in a self hosted S3 bucket. Thanos also acts as a datasource for my dashboards in Grafana, and provides a Ruler, which evaluates alerting rules against my metrics and forwards them to my alertmanager. It's ok. It's certainly got it's downsides, which I can go into later, but I've thinking... what about Mimir?

How do you all feel about Grafana's Mimir (source on GitHub)? It's AGPL and seems to literally be a replacement of Thanos, which is Apache 2.0.

Thanos description from their website:

Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.

Mimir description from their website:

...open source software project that provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics.
Both with work with alloy and prometheus alike. Both require you to configure initially confusing hashrings and replication parameters. Both have a bunch of large companies adopting them, so... now I feel conflicted. Should I try mimir? Poll in reply.

#thanos #prometheus #alloy #grafana #observability #monitoring #kubernetes #k8s #foss #sre

Show threadJesseBot

If you've tried both Thanos and Mimir, which do you prefer? Feel free to comment why below 

#thanos #prometheus #alloy #grafanaAlloy #grafana #observability #monitoring #kubernetes #k8s #foss #sre #mimir #grafanaMimir

Thanos
55.6%
Mimir AKA Grafana Mimir
44.4%
Poll ended at .
Apr 4, 2025 at 6:14pmWeb
Show thread__aveigaApr 4, 2025
@jessebot the fact that Mimir is AGPL licensed immediately dequalifies it for usage in many organizations
Show threadJesseBotApr 4, 2025

@aveiga Yeah, I know. You should work to fight that in your organization though. I know it's not easy because I've done it at big international companies that are 10k+ employees and it's pain, but you can get exceptions for it in through your legal department. I know it takes months or even years. You should do it anyway though because it's a very good license that fosters a good FOSS environment.

It's also worth noting that if the company doesn't allow for using any open source software that is GPL/AGPL, and they don't allow an exception request process to do so, then I probably can't use a significant portion of software I rely on daily and so I don't want to work there. I already don't work for defense/police, oil/gas/car, or banks/fintech companies though, so that helps narrow down a lot of potential headache on my part.

Show thread__aveigaApr 4, 2025
@jessebot the thing is, there is no jurisprudence, as such it is irresponsible to push for it. No proper legal department should ever agree to put their company through that risk. And I sure don’t want that to be my responsibility. Historically, we’ve had other companies stating that our usage of their AGPL software would required paid licenses (minIO, for example)
Show threadJesseBotApr 4, 2025

@aveiga

it is irresponsible to push for it

No proper legal department should ever agree to put their company through that risk.

We disagree here. It doesn't sound like you used Mimir at scale though given your response.

Show threadcloudymaxApr 4, 2025
@[email protected] @[email protected] That's true, but so is Grafana and I've managed to get that in everywhere I've asked aside from one large multi-national logistics company. It's not a sure-thing but if you're using/operating it for yourself and not as part of a product then I usually have hope. Worst they can do is say "No" 🤷
Show thread__aveigaApr 4, 2025
@cloudymax @jessebot the thing is, there is no jurisprudence, as such it is irresponsible to push for it. No proper legal department should ever agree to put their company through that risk. And I sure don’t want that to be my responsibility. Historically, we’ve had other companies stating that our usage of their AGPL software would required paid licenses (minIO, for example). For purely internal usage it’s a no brainer, if there is customer exposure, even embedded, than it’s a no go
Show threadcloudymaxApr 4, 2025

@aveiga @jessebot > For purely internal usage it’s a no brainer, if there is customer exposure, even embedded, than it’s a no go

Yep, that's been my experience.

Show threadJ C LawrenceApr 7, 2025
@jessebot I don't miss Thanos, not even slightly. While the slight impedances with Google Managed Prometheus are a PITA (eg the slightly different CRDs and messy-to-GitOps OperatorConfig stuff), the details that federation and aggregation across projects is just a few clicks or a trivial Terraform stanza away, and you automatically get 2 years of metric retention with no fuss is pretty compelling.
Show threadJesseBotApr 7, 2025
@jcl To clarify, are you using Mimir? I do not want to use a managed service at this time.
Show threadJ C LawrenceApr 7, 2025
@jessebot Nope, just a happy GMP user.