Metrictank
Metrictank is a multi-tenant timeseries platform for Graphite developed by Grafana Labs. Metrictank powers Grafana Cloud’s Hosted Metrics Graphite platform, and monitoring/observability systems at companies such as Bloomberg and Expedia.
Metrictank provides high availability and efficient long-term storage, retrieval, and processing for large-scale environments. It also provides enhanced functionality such as meta tags, per-request performance/cost statistics, and controls to limit the impact of expensive queries.
Grafana Labs is proud to lead the development of Metrictank, building first-class support for Metrictank into Grafana, and ensuring Grafana customers receive Metrictank support and features they need.
Features
Horizontally scalable and highly available
Metrictank clustering is modeled around Kafka, which provides a robust write-ahead log and allows for a large degree of flexibility when deploying Metrictank itself. You can run multiple replicas and separate out reading, writing, and query roles, if desired. Nodes communicate via gossip and are eventually consistent (typically sub-second).
Efficient storage
Our storage format is inspired by the Facebook gorilla paper, making use of heavily compressed chunks and reducing your overall storage costs over long periods of time. Supported backends are Bigtable and Cassandra. Compared to other Cassandra-based solutions, our approach of storing compressed chunks rather than individual values allows us to get great performance out of Cassandra.
Ingestion and querying
Metrictank, through the use of sharding, can easily scale to ingest tens of millions of data points per second, and these data points are available immediately (sub-second) for querying.
Graphite compatible
Metrictank can replace a Graphite cluster. It supports most of the same processing functions (proxying to Graphite to handle less common functions that aren’t “native” yet), and tooling is available to import data from Whisper. Users commonly achieve 10x disk space reduction.
Additional functionality
Metrictank extends Graphite with meta tags, series lineage metadata, multi-tenancy, query load restrictions, and more.
Community
Come join our community! We are active on Slack and host monthly public community calls.
Want to contribute to Metrictank? It’s easy: Check out our contributor guidelines.
Contributors
Want to work on Metrictank? We’re hiring!
More Information
From the Blog
- How to stream Graphite metrics to Grafana Cloud using carbon-relay-ng
- Improving Graphite rollup and runtime consolidation in Metrictank and Grafana 7.0 with lineage metadata
- Watch talks on Cortex vs. Thanos, Metrictank past and present, and a preview of Grafana 7 from our recent meetup
- Meet the Grafana Labs Team: Florian Boucault!
Products and Services
Grafana Cloud: Hosted Graphite
- Use our high-performance, Graphite-compatible hosted metrics service for bringing together metrics from multiple Graphite instances.
- No commitments: Pay for only what you use with our usage-based pricing.
Enterprise Support for Metrictank
- Get support and training from Metrictank maintainers and experts.
- 24x7x365 coverage from our geographically distributed team.
- Per-node pricing scales with your deployment.
Related Case Studies
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