Prometheus Is Not a TSDB

Misconception - the right word to explain my early Prometheus experience. I came to Prometheus with vast Graphite and moderate InfluxDB experience. In my eyes, Graphite was a highly performant but fairly limited system. Metrics in Graphite are just strings (well, dotted), and the values are always stored aggregated with the lowest possible resolution of 1 second. But due to these limitations, Graphite is fast. In contrast, InfluxDB adopts Metrics 2.0 format with multiple tags and fields per metric. It also allows the storage of non-aggregated data points with impressive nanosecond precision. But this power needs to be used carefully. Otherwise, you'll get all sorts of performance issues.

Prometheus is not a TSDB

Read more