Mastodawn

JesseBot Apr 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

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C S Apr 4, 2025

@jessebot I don't trust Grafana to maintain Mimir for long enough after how quickly they deprecated Cortex.

Have you considered VictoriaMetrics? It performs and compacts really well, and while it can't use S3 for warm storage it runs well even on spinning rust, making long term retention on block storage viable.

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JesseBot

@claus No, I hadn't considered VictoriaMetrics, but I'll give it a looksie. Thanks for mentioning it. I really do love S3 as the universal storage backend though. It makes stateless a bit more achievable in a lot of instances.

But yeah, they also deprecated Promtail, but Alloy has been a fine replacement and I have no complaints. I don't care if you deprecate as long as you replace.