What's the most promising alternative to Prometheus/Grafana if you're developing a new solution around OTEL? If you could start today and pick tools, what would you go for?
This didn‘t feel right, so we looked around and found greptimedb https://github.com/GreptimeTeam/greptimedb, which simplifies the whole stack. It‘s designed to handle metrics, logs, and traces. We collect metrics and logs via OpenTelemetry, and visualize them with Grafana. It provides endpoints for Postgres, MySQL, PromQL; we‘re happy to be able to build dashboards using SQL as that’s where we have the most knowledge.
The benchmarks look promising, but our k8s clusters aren’t huge anyway. As a platform engineer, we appreciate the simplicity of our observability stack.
Any other happy greptimedb users around here? Together with OTel, we think we can handle all future obs needs.
Thank you for giving GreptimeDB a shout-out—it means a lot to us. We created GreptimeDB to simplify the observability data stack with an all-in-one database, and we’re glad to hear it’s been helpful.
OpenTelemetry-native is a requirement, not an option, for the new observability data stack. I believe otel-arrow (https://github.com/open-telemetry/otel-arrow) has strong future potential, and we are committed to supporting and improving it.
FYI: I think SQL is great for building everything—dashboards, alerting rules, and complex analytics—but PromQL still has unique value in the Prometheus ecosystem. To be transparent, GreptimeDB still has some performance issues with PromQL, which we’ll address before the 1.0 GA.
Are you saying that you prefer SQL over PromQL for metrics queries? I haven't tried querying metrics via SQL yet, but generally speaking have found PromQL to be one of the easier query languages to learn - more straightforward and concise IME. What advantages does SQL offer here?
PromQL, on the other hand, is purpose-built for observability — it’s optimized for time‑series data, streaming calculations, and real‑time aggregation. It’s definitely easier to learn and more straightforward when your goal is to reason about metrics and alerting.
SQL’s strengths are in relational joins, richer operator sets, and higher‑level abstraction, which make it more powerful for analytical use cases beyond monitoring. PromQL trades that flexibility for simplicity and immediacy — which is exactly what makes it great for monitoring.
Disclosure: I am a maintainer of OpenObserve
I've been doing monitoring since before it was called observability with good old Nagios, and the modern observability stack is insane. I'm glad that tools like OpenObserve and SigNoz exist.
open source and opentelemetry-native. Lots of our users have migrated from grafana to overcome challenges like having to handle multiple backends.
p.s - i am one of the maintainers.