Comparisons To Alternatives¶
The following table summarises feature comparison between different existing open source time series database. More details are written below, if needed.
Features |
Gnocchi |
Prometheus |
InfluxDB |
OpenTSDB |
Graphite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Metric polling |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
Resource history |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Multi-tenant |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Query interface |
REST API |
REST API |
HTTP |
TCP |
None |
High-available |
Yes |
No |
With Relay |
Yes |
No |
Scalable |
Yes |
No |
Commercial only |
Yes |
No |
Alerting |
No (roadmap) |
Yes |
With Kapacitor |
No |
No |
Grafana support |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
collectd support |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Gnocchi vs Prometheus¶
Prometheus is a full-featured solution that includes everything from polling the metrics to storing and archiving them. It offers advanced features such as alerting.
In comparison, Gnocchi does not offer polling as it prefers to leverage existing solutions (e.g. collectd). However, it provides high-availability and horizontal scalablity as well as multi-tenancy.
Gnocchi vs InfluxDB¶
InfluxDB is a time series database storing metrics into local files. It offers a variety of input protocol support and created its own query language, InfluxQL, inspired from SQL. The HTTP API it offers is just a way to pass InfluxQL over the wire. Horizontal scalability is only provided in the commercial version. The data model is based on time series with labels associated to it.
In comparison, Gnocchi offers scalability and multi-tenancy. Its data model differs as it does not provide labels, but resources to attach to metrics.
Gnocchi vs OpenTSDB¶
OpenTSDB is a distributed time series database that uses Hadoop and HBase to store its data. That makes it easy to scale horizontally. However, its querying feature are rather simple.
In comparison, Gnocchi offers a proper query language with more features. The usage of Hadoop might be a show-stopper for many as it’s quite heavy to deploy and operate.
Gnocchi vs Graphite¶
Graphite is essentially a data metric storage composed of flat files (Whisper), and focuses on rendering those time series. Each time series stored is composed of points that are stored regularly and are related to the current date and time.
In comparison, Gnocchi offers much more scalability, a better file format and no relativity to the current time and date.