Grafana on Techetio

Doing Deadman Checks With Prometheus Metrics in MetricsQL

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:44:39 +0000

The lack of functionality to do deadman checks is one of my biggest gripes with PromQL. Fortunately, MetricsQL (a superset of PromQL) has added this functionality, and it’s very easy to use. If you’re not familiar with MetricsQL, it’s the built in query language in VictoriaMetrics, a horizontally scalable time series database. VictoriaMetrics is my go to database for storing Prometheus metrics because of how performant and easy to use it is compared to alternatives like Mimir or Thanos.

Setting Up A Grafana Loki Demo Environment on Kubernetes

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:10:12 +0000

I recently wanted to set up a small Loki environment on Kubernetes just to see how it worked, evaluate how it performs out of the box, and decide if it was something I wanted to use for a small logging environment. Grafana has Helm charts available and instructions on how to use them for this specific purpose, but I (among many others based on the countless GitHub issues) have still had an incredibly difficult time setting up the simplest possible Loki environment. Because of that, I figured I would put out what ended up working for me.

Evaluating Backend Options For Prometheus Metrics

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 03:49:03 +0000

I’ve recently been looking at consolidating metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into one horizontally scalable central store. There’s plenty of open source options out there, with the most notable being Thanos, Cortex (now Mimir), Victoria Metrics, M3DB, etc.

I’ve managed to narrow my search down to Mimir and Victoria Metrics. The main reason for going with these two is that they offer support for more metric formats than just Prometheus, and while this isn’t a requirement, for my specific use case it’s a nice to have. Mimir has major support behind it through it’s creator, Grafana Labs, as well as the open source community surrounding Grafana and it’s umbrella of products. While Victoria Metrics isn’t quite as known as Grafana Labs or Mimir, it has plenty of open source support behind it, and an Enterprise offering there to maintain and build upon it.