Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as Prometheus)... what's your selling point? This to me seems like yet another way to re-invent the wheel.
If it's just for running locally, okay, fine, but when it comes to production (where the stack really matters) at scale, you end up with lots of tradeoffs and approaches.
Why is this one a winning one compared to the overwhelming "competition"? Seems like we're re-inventing the wheel for the 100th time instead of focusing on unifying the efforts in making the existing solutions better. Thankfully we now have OTEL, so at least the interoperability part is somewhat solved (or mitigated)
Last Dec I had a customer complaint, took me 2 days to find the issue. I had to pay $800 for Sentry and a bit more for New Relic. The issue was a locking problem that happened only in very very specific cases, erroring in diff places and timing out in others, unfortunately power users were running into it often. I had two systems, no SLO to catch this and they were completely disconnected. Super annoying.
Anyhow, I spent a day looking at those and eventually went, screw this, I'm gonna just make this actually work. So I spent a few hours, hooked it up, no auth or anything nice, pulled the traces and found the issue. Turns out it was locking due to a long transaction existing in a scheduled task, it existed for years.
The big things for me is it automatically flagging issues, prioritizing them and taking into account: errors, response codes, timing. That's why I'm making it, no venture capital, funded by actual revenue from the start (not paying for Sentry or New Relic anymore). It's really a dev focused tool to help smallish teams find and fix issues before customers even have time to complain.
Anyhow, hope that explains it, kinda related to cloud costs, mostly just my personal frustration with existing tools. Also I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s) for something that can be done in a 60mb go binary that runs on a 3$ server...
A lot of tools in this space, most pretty good. The goals when I started Traceway were: - simple to host and reason about - cheap to host - comes pre configured for sub 15 dev teams - completely open source, no paid ad-ons
It's not aimed at teams that can afford SREs (yet), the idea was to provide a good tool for smaller teams and startups in the sub 15 dev range.
The base of Traceway is Clickhouse, nothing special there, if you want you can run it with sqlite for self hosting. Sessions are also stored in S3 so the costs are minimal.
It is opinionated, it comes with preconfigured SLOs for flagging issues with endpoints and it will never try to sell you an AI SRE, you can file your exceptions/slo issues with the git integration and run what ever AI you want on it (I was sick of observability tools trying to sell me an AI). The goal is to have a one line setup, for OpenTelemetry, that gets you everything you need in Traceway without anything needing to be additionally configured. It's Datadog/Sentry but combined and fully open sourced.
I'm a huge fan of open source, here is what we've done so far for making existing solutions better:
1 - Session Replays/RUM
Session replays are usually a premium/expensive feature. With Traceway you can self host them and add them to your app in minutes. I am working on making this a standalone feature that ties into the otel sdks for mobile/js so that you can get your spans/logs/metrics/exceptions from any platform connected to your session replays in Traceway. At one point I got nerd snipped into making it work with Flutter, so we are the only solution I know of that has affordable usable session replays for Flutter.
2 - Symfony Otel
Symfony, the php framework, had no library that offered a few line setup and worked out of the box with open telemetry. We wrote one, you can use it with any tool out there.
3 - Symbolicator
We're working on a symbolicator that will be Open Telemetry Collector compatible, so that you can get your stack traces for Js/Flutter/Android/iOS resolved back. From what I can tell no good solution exists for this currently.
I will make a proper HN post at some point with more info on the project, right now I am focusing on building. If you have any ideas or things you'd like to see feel free to comment, join our discord community or open the issue in our git, we're always happy to accept PRs.
VictoriaMetrics and Logs have worked fine in my quiet homelab, and VictoriaMetrics appeared to work great for the infrastructure team of an open source online video game I contribute to (say about 10 physical nodes and 20 applications/services ) ... I was going to suggest VictoriaLogs to them next but wanted to ask what roadblocks could come up.
I thought how come no one is trying to solve this problem. It looks like it's just a matter of time.
With that being said, my experience can be very skewed since prepbook is a passion project running on a VPS with essentially 0 scale. All I care about is the UX of the stack, not scale. Just for context.
What exactly were you struggling with when it came to the setup? Just a ton of new concepts to learn which took time, or something specific to Grafana/Prometheus/Loki?
I'm working on a comprehensive benchmark of Traceway performance on different hardware configurations. The most I've tested with was the smallest managed ch instance with 250k traces per sec, handled it without a hiccup (but that's empirical). You can checkout the traceway git, there is an issue I've opened for benchmarking and you can subscribe/comment on it if you're interested. I'm benchmarking across sqlite, self hosted clickhouse and managed clickhouse. I am a huge fan of systematic, realistic and most of all reproducible benchmarks, so I am really excited about the progress on that.
Anyhow, you can checkout traceway and see what it offers, it's aimed at providing SLOs out of the box, session replays, alerting, configurable dashboards and great exception tracking (automatic symbolication) etc...
Production? As soon as you scale you need a proper solution. Prometheus (by itself) doesn't scale - you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar).
Clickhouse (the "clickstack") seems to be the new kid on the block. Looks very promising.
Unfortunately my account is being rate limited and I can't response to each comment.
Thank you for your support the attention project has received has been unreal.
I'll be responding to everyone as the rate limit subsides but I've made this in the meantime: https://github.com/tracewayapp/traceway/blob/main/HN.md
Again, thank you for your support!
- ClickStack (ex HyperDX) - SigNoz - Traceway - a few more
does someone has enough feedback on those to be able to tell which one works best?
I have not used SigNoz or ClickStack. I believe both are very good products that focus on slightly different things.
With Traceway I am trying to focus on providing a pre configured system that works out of the box, tells you whats wrong and what to fix. It comes with a great issue tracker, session replays/RUM, preconfigured Dashboards and it's easy to host. It has an alerting integrations with Slack and Github. The idea is to be proactive rather than reactive when you start growing, so rather than waiting for a failure to build out an SLO it comes with them included.
Based on what you're looking for Traceway may or may not be the best option for you, but all feedback is welcome and I am working on improving it every day. You can checkout the github + it's super easy to self host and I am always down to chat about how it works in the Traceway Discord.
Trust is hard to earn and that is why everything I have done with Traceway has been and will continue to be open source. Traceway cloud currently has 3 enterprise customers that are using it and about 50 on lower tier plans. It's an actual live product.
The marketing website has been fully vibe coded, I have too much on my plate right now and I'm not great at designing marketing pages. At some point I'm planing to rewrite it, it has been what most people have complained about, I just have too many things that I need to finish first in the actual product.
I use claude code periodically, other than telling you to checkout my git commit history for the last 10 years there is not much more I can do. The amount of commits this year has not been any greater than before. I don't think I'm pushing on getting things out too quickly or with lower quality.
If you want to read an engineering article I've written recently to see how I approach things here is one I am proud of: https://medium.com/@dusan.stanojevic.cs/flutter-session-repl...
Other than that I just have to continue building, there is nothing else I can do, but I understand where you're coming from and I think that your concern is absolutely valid.
Traceway is fully OTel compliant.
Go: The original version started with Go SDKs. I've since moved to using Go OTel. I haven't updated those docs yet because the Go SDKs still work and are used in the wild, but they're on the deprecation track. Thanks for pointing it out.
Symfony: There were no good one-line OTel integrations out there for Symfony, so we wrote one. It is not a custom SDK, it's an OTel configurator. You can use it with any backend, not just Traceway. We're firm believers in contributing back to the OpenTelemetry community.
Frontend / mobile: This is more complicated. The current frontend and mobile OTel spec does not allow session replays to be sent, so for those platforms we still keep SDKs with a custom protocol alongside OTel. As soon as the spec matures I'm hoping to move it fully to OTel.
I saw it recently, I think it looks amazing, I haven't looked into it enough to know of any downsides. I am currently heads down in building as I have the roadmap cut out for the next few months, I will circle back to them as soon as I have a bit more time.
If you're familiar with their platform feel free to checkout Traceway and let me know if there are any incredible features you'd like to see in Traceway or anything they're missing. I am always looking for feedback!
https://github.com/plausible/analytics
Elixir.
I have a background in having done a lot of stuff on the Elastic stack related to this; including setting up a big Elastic Fleet based stack for one client at some point. It might not be the cheapest, but it does provide awesome filtering and querying capabilities. However, a lot of teams that use it don't really know how to tap into that capability so it tends to be overengineered for what it does in the end. And the extra, underutilized complexity is why a lot of teams are wary of dealing with that stack.
Storing the data is the easy part but what's the point if you can't run queries against it and produce dashboards and diagnostic tools that actually help you? Prometheus/grafana or older graphite type setups tend to be compromises where you get lots of data but are then limited on the querying front or the number of metrics. The tradeoff is always between scale and querying flexibility. If you store tens/hundreds of GB of telemetry per day, you need a way to make sense of it. Clickhouse seems to be quite good at scaling and querying. It's basically a column database. I don't have direct experience with Loki.
But in the end, all that power only matters if people actually use it. And, again, in my experience teams tend not to. They tend to have a lot of unrealized aspirations around their tools and infrastructure. If it's just a dumping ground for data + a few simplistic dashboards, optimize for that. A lot of that data is actually only kept for compliance/auditing reasons. For that, querying is usually a secondary concern and it's OK if queries take a bit longer and are less powerful.
Traceway has custom dashboards, supports otel logs/traces/metrics/exceptions fully, has session replays for web and flutter (working on ios/android now), has alerting integrations with slack/email/github, oauth login w google/github, and a bunch of other features... All MIT. None behind a paywall.
It has a specific set of trade offs, those are by design, but I am also always open to changing them and improving it. If you try it and have any thoughts the git issues are constantly monitored.
In reality it's a very modular system, the telemetry repositories can be swapped out easily, I have implemented a clickhouse and a sqlite version (to simplify self hosting) so adding a loki like repository would be a breeze. It's not on the roadmap currently as I am putting a lot of effort into 3 diff parts rn.
The truth is that Clickhouse is an incredible DB that scales really well for observability data.
But you can't beat the excellent price and performance. Does what I need and much more
Just to clarify: VictoriaMetrics doesn't use bots for HN or for any other media for promotion.
I don't know the person who you responded to. Most of the activity you see is coming from community members who genuinely use the project or from the core engineering team trying to answer user's questions or address misunderstandings.
> never responding to any comments
Could you please share examples like this? I can't say for community members, but our internal policy for engineers is very much focused on great support. You can check our slack/github to see that every question is answered and well explained.
This is probably the 5th comment (almost identical) I have seen about VictoriaMetrics, mostly on Reddit. I engaged with a few trying to learn more about your product and eventually just gave up. If you really want you can comb through my reddit comments, but be warned, I have commented on a lot of things... a lot...
You should be proud of what you have built, I've looked a bit more and your product looks incredible. I personally think that a sales person might have been testing an automation tool, but if it was actual customers that just shows how good the product is!
Traceway is not working on addressing the problems y'all are solving, it is more focused on having an out of the box experience with preconfigured dashboards, SLOs, integrations, automatic endpoint ranking, frontend session replays/RUM, symbolication etc.
Again, thank you for your comment.
Please feel free to go through my post history and observe I comment on things I am interested in, like databases, servers, and video games.
The comment read out of place/generic and given my previous experience I incorrectly assumed it was another generic bot - my bad.
Hopefully no hard feelings and Victoria looks great.
What do you like the most about it and how was your experience scaling it?
I am the creator of Traceway and it's my all time fav database. Having said that the repositories in Traceway are completely modular, I've implemented the sqlite version so that I can skip docker containers locally and to simplify self hosting for side projects (it runs on like 2$ servers without issues). This is why it's uniquely suitable for telemetry data and why I've used it as the base of Traceway.
They've acquired HyperDX because it was a major Clickhouse user because their whole platform was telemetry on top of Clickhouse. I hope they don't fully pivot into the space as it would be quite awkward, but there are alternatives and I can always redo repositories with a diff storage engine/db.
We at VictoriaMetrics took another approach. We tried using ClickHouse as a database for metrics in 2017, but then decided implementing a specialized database for metrics. This database uses ClickHouse architecture ideas for achieving the best performance and the lowest resource usage. The main difference between ClickHouse and VictoriaMetrics is that VictoriaMetrics is optimized solely for typical observability tasks. It supports all the popular data ingestion protocols, it provides promql-compatible querying API, it provides Graphite-compatible querying API, it provides Prometheus-compatible service discovery and relabeling, it provides Prometheus-compatible alerting and recording rules. It provides built-in web UI for quick exploration and analysis of the ingested metrics, with the ability to investigate the source of high cardinality. It consists of a single small executable (~20MB) without external dependencies with minimum configs and minimum maintenance. See https://altinity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/How-ClickHou... for more details.
We used the same approach for building VictoriaLogs - a specialized database for logs. It uses the most appropriate architecture ideas from ClickHouse for achieving high performance and low resource usage. It is schemaless and zero-config. It contains of a single small executable without external dependencies. It accepts logs via popular data ingestion protocols. It provides a specialized query language for typical queries over production logs - LogsQL. This language is much simpler to use than SQL for querying typical logs. It provides a built-in web UI for quick exploration of the ingested logs. It provides a Grafana plugin for building arbitrary complex dashboards from the stored logs. It provides the ability to build alerts and metrics from the stored logs. See https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/faq/#what-is-t...
I am the creator of Traceway, after reading that I think we're in adjacent vertices.
Traceway is aimed at providing teams with no dedicated SREs with preconfigured SLOs, a preconfigured dashboard and a really powerful exception tracking. It integrates with git to automatically open issues as well as slack and others. The idea is to get the experience of Datadog/Sentry in the open source space.
I've focused a lot on session replays, RUM and now symbolication for native, flutter and frontend applications - this might be a potential place where VictoriaMetrics could benefit from integrating with Traceway.
If any of that sounds potentially interesting let me know. Again, thank you for your comment.
"Getting it ready for production" is a different game.
I've fallen on my sword many times by trying to explain that prometheus fails every metric of production ready; in fact Google themselves replaced borgmon (prometheus) for Monarch because the "tiny unreliable time series databases everywhere" was in fact, not the successful and reliable deployment strategy that they had claimed.
But, it is very easy to set up. Just don't go looking for failure modes, because they're everywhere and every single one of them is catastrophic.
See this PR for example (https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/18364) - this used to impact a production deployment I worked on. Prometheus, Thanos and even OpenTelemetry are full of those kind of problems - but at the same time it's the best we have and we should be grateful they're free and open source.
I'd still choose an open source stack (and contribute to it) rather than go for a proprietary solution - we've all seen what happens with DataDog & co.
Please don't take my words lightly, I worked with the rest of my team in a large scale observability platform and scalability should not be underestimated - at the same time DataDog / Splunk prices are simply unjustified. It's ironically cheaper to build a team of engineers that will maintain a sane observability stack instead of feeding the monster(s).
Can you show the math here? This is a very bold claim, and I’m super curious. A shared Google Sheet would work well.
Do you have concrete examples of these catastrophic failures? I've personally havent experienced any myself during these years, but I'm doing very boring and typical stuff, so wouldn't surprise me there was hard edges still.
Technically even a single server running LAMP as root but taking frontend traffic meets the definition of in production but I think we all recognise that it's not the right idea.
What I'm referring to is: should the disk start to have issues: what does prometheus do? If the scrapers start to stall due to connection timeouts: what does prometheus do? If you are doing linear interpolation of data and you have massive gaps because you're polling opportunisitically: what does prometheus do.
I'm all about boring technology, but prometheus assumes too much happy path. It assumes that a single node is enough for time series data that is used for alerting.
Which, it is: at very small scale and with best effort reliability.
It's not acceptable as soon as lost data could be critically important in diagnosing major issues in billing systems, or actually billing users, or to infer issues that need to be correlated across multiple systems.
I have created Traceway because I looked at that stack and decided that I'm not going to add 7 more services to my stack that could all fail that I now have to maintain as well. Here is the list: Grafana, Otel Collector (to forward metrics), Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, K8s.
This is not maintainable in production, unless you have a person to manage it. My app had about 500-1000 req/sec, this sounds like a lot but it's extremely light from the observability perspective. Why would I add 7 more points of failure and services to monitor for proper resource allocation for something like this? To add insult to injury I would have to keep building my SLOs, they wouldn't be tracked automatically by default, I would have to keep paying for Sentry because the issue tracking is quite lacking on Grafana. Oh almost forgot, I would also have to get an alerting provider or pay for that (maybe I'm wrong, it was 6 mo ago).
Anyhow, Traceway is a 60mb binary in Go, it works with Clickhouse or Sqlite and the data is stored on S3 when not used. That means you can host it with sqlite on the 2$ server or even free tier and have it working for your side projects, you can host it with managed clickhouse and get auto scalability on the db level.
The goal is to provide full observability and tools to fix issues directly for developers. What we have so far: alerts, notifications, SSO (google & github), integrations, metrics, preconfigured SLOs, distributed tracing, RUM/session recordings (js & flutter).
Almost forgot, you'd need a symbolicator as well, or your fe/mobile exception stack traces will be messed up in Grafana, I don't even know which tool they have for that, but it's always a new service to host and maintain...
In other words, I would absolutely expect a NixOS user to understand how to stand up prom in prod. But I wouldn’t value a statement from that person saying that it’s easy to do so because of course it is. You use NixOS. You might argue that the skill sets are entirely different, and I might accept that argument, but then still say, if you are smart enough and masochistic enough to beat your head against the wall to use NixOS, then deploying prom in prod is obviously going to be trivial to you.
If that happens, is prometheus really the biggest of your worries here? Software breaks left and right when disks disappear from under them, I'm not sure this is neither unexpected or unique to prometheus.
> If the scrapers start to stall due to connection timeouts: what does prometheus do?
I'm having this "issue" all the time, as some of my WiFi connected (less important) cameras are just within the WiFi range, and I'm using prometheus to scrape metrics from them. It seems like the requests times out, then the next time it doesn't, and everything just works? What's the issue you're experiencing with this exactly?
> It's not acceptable as soon as lost data could be critically important in diagnosing major issues in billing systems, or actually billing users, or
Wait what? Billing systems? That stuff would go into your proper database, wouldn't it? Sure, if prometheus/node_exporter fails or whatever, you won't get metrics out of the host, but again, if those things start failing on that host, the host is having bigger issues than "prometheus suck at scale".
I was eagerly awaiting to be educated about potential gaps in my understanding of prometheus, instead it seems like you simply don't happen to like they way they do things? I was under the impression they did something wrong or something was broken, but these things just seems like the typical stuff you have to think about for any service you deploy.
That's not a general "software breaks when disks fail" situation: that's a monitoring system failing at its one job.
Your monitoring system failing silently when your infrastructure is under stress is precisely the failure mode that monitoring exists to prevent.
Zabbix solves this with native HA and self-checks. Prometheus makes it your problem to solve with external tooling, and most people don't, until they need it.
Of course the systems that have to alert me to failure have to be designed with mechanisms to alert me to the fact that they themselves are failing.
Zabbix, Nagios, Munin -- practically everything that existed before: understood this.
Prometheus doesn't because it optimised intentionally for being easy to deploy and for there being a hierarchy of prometheus's in a tree-like formation. Which makes sense, but forces a much more distributed and difficult to reason model.
Monitoring systems can't be designed for the happy path. By definition, they only matter when things are going wrong- which is precisely when the happy path isn't available. Prometheus is excellent when everything is fine (scaling aside). That's not when you need your monitoring system to be excellent.
But, I'm sure your setup makes as much sense in your context as mine makes in my context. As long as it works for you, we're all happy :)