Graphite and Prometheus are both great tools for monitoring networks, servers, other infrastructure, and applications. Both Graphite and Prometheus are what we call time-series monitoring systems, meaning they both focus on monitoring metrics that record data points over time. At MetricFire we offer a hosted version of Graphite, so our users can try it out on our free trial and see which works better in their case.

Behind the trends of cloud-native architectures and microservices lies a technical complexity, a paradigm shift, and a rugged learning curve. This complexity manifests itself in the design, deployment, and security, as well as everything that concerns the monitoring and observability of applications running in distributed systems like Kubernetes. Fortunately, there are tools to help developers overcome these obstacles.

Prometheus and Grafana are the two most groundbreaking open-source monitoring and analysis tools in the past decade. Ever since developers started combining these two, there's been nothing else that they've needed. There are many different ways a Prometheus and Grafana stack can be set up.

Data visualization is a way to make sense of the vast amount of information generated in the digital world. By converting raw data into a more understandable format, such as charts, graphs, and maps, it enables humans to see patterns, trends, and insights more quickly and easily. This helps in better decision making, strategic planning, and problem-solving. Visualization and understanding data are critical in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings like Heroku.

Virtual machines give you a flexible and convenient environment where people can access different operating systems, networks, and storage while still using the same computer. This prevents them from purchasing extra machines, switching to other devices, and maintaining them. This helps companies to save costs and increase task efficiency. Although using VMs for everyday tasks may be enjoyable, ensuring consistent performance and performing maintenance can be daunting.

In this article, we will be covering how to monitor Kubernetes using Graphite, and we’ll do the visualization with Grafana. The focus will be on monitoring and plotting essential metrics for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. We will download, implement and monitor custom dashboards for Kubernetes that can be downloaded from the Grafana dashboard resources. These dashboards have variables to allow drilling down into the data at a granular level.

Prometheus is becoming a popular tool for monitoring Python applications despite the fact that it was originally designed for single-process multi-threaded applications, rather than multi-process. Prometheus was developed in the Soundcloud environment and was inspired by Google’s Borgmon. In its original environment, Borgmon relies on straightforward methods of service discovery - where Borg can easily find all jobs running on a cluster.

Before we jump into the specifics of Grafana and Datadog, let's look at the main comparison points. Grafana is a great dashboard that allows you to plug in essentially any data source in the world. Grafana is most commonly paired with Prometheus, Graphite, and Elasticsearch to provide a full APM, time-series, and logs monitoring stack.

Synthetic testing, also referred to as continuous monitoring or synthetic monitoring, is a technique for identifying performance problems with critical user journeys and application endpoints before they impair the user experience. Businesses may use synthetic testing to assess the uptime of their services, application response times, and the efficiency of consumer transactions on a proactive basis.