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Kube-state-metrics VS Prometheus

Compare Kube-state-metrics VS Prometheus and see what are their differences

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Kube-state-metrics logo Kube-state-metrics

Kube-state-metrics is an all-in-one monitoring system for Kubernetes clusters, providing an easy evaluation about the state of the cluster and its services, and surfaces detailed statistics about their performance.

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • Kube-state-metrics Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-06
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

Kube-state-metrics features and specs

  • Deep Kubernetes Insights
    Kube-state-metrics provides detailed metrics about the state of Kubernetes objects, which can offer deeper insights into the health and performance of a Kubernetes cluster compared to basic node and pod metrics.
  • Prometheus Integration
    It is designed to generate metrics in a format that is compatible with Prometheus, making it easy to integrate into existing Prometheus-based monitoring setups.
  • Real-Time Monitoring
    Kube-state-metrics continuously monitors Kubernetes API server for object state changes and updates metrics in real-time, ensuring that monitoring information is up-to-date.
  • Open Source and Community Supported
    Being an open-source project under the Kubernetes umbrella, kube-state-metrics benefits from active community development, contributions, and support.
  • Lightweight
    Kube-state-metrics is designed to be lightweight and non-intrusive, as it only scrapes the Kubernetes API to expose metrics without altering any state itself.

Possible disadvantages of Kube-state-metrics

  • Limited to Kubernetes States
    Kube-state-metrics focuses solely on Kubernetes object states and does not collect metrics about the infrastructure or applications themselves, which may necessitate additional tools for a complete monitoring solution.
  • Requires Prometheus
    For meaningful use of the metrics provided by kube-state-metrics, an existing Prometheus setup is necessary, which could be a downside for teams not already using Prometheus.
  • Scalability Concerns
    In very large clusters, the large volume of metrics generated may lead to performance challenges, potentially requiring careful configuration to manage the load on Prometheus.
  • Complexity of Data Analysis
    While kube-state-metrics provides a wealth of data, extracting actionable insights can be complex without proper visualization and analysis tools.

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

Analysis of Prometheus

Overall verdict

  • Prometheus is highly regarded for its robustness, versatility, and efficiency in monitoring and alerting tasks, especially within cloud-native environments.

Why this product is good

  • Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability.
  • It excels at time-series data collection and querying, making it ideal for infrastructure and application monitoring.
  • Prometheus has a flexible query language, PromQL, which allows users to extract and manipulate data effectively.
  • The tool is widely adopted in the industry and has a strong community-driven ecosystem, ensuring consistent updates and support.
  • It integrates seamlessly with many other systems and services, such as Kubernetes, making it versatile across various environments.

Recommended for

  • Organizations seeking a reliable monitoring solution for dynamic cloud environments, such as Kubernetes.
  • Teams that require real-time alerting and data visualization capabilities.
  • Developers and DevOps professionals interested in leveraging a mature and active open-source monitoring tool.
  • Businesses aiming to monitor diverse and large-scale infrastructures with a flexible query system.

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How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Category Popularity

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Developer Tools
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Monitoring Tools
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100% 100
Cloud Computing
100 100%
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Log Management
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User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Kube-state-metrics and Prometheus

Kube-state-metrics Reviews

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Prometheus Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Prometheus and Grafana are used together as an open-source monitoring and alerting solution with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects the Linux hardware and OS metrics exposed by *nix kernel and then stores as time-series data, using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in a multi-dimensional data model of the timestamped metrics (i.e.,...
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus seems to be a lot more popular than Kube-state-metrics. While we know about 285 links to Prometheus, we've tracked only 12 mentions of Kube-state-metrics. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Kube-state-metrics mentions (12)

  • Kubernetes Observability With Kube-State-Metrics
    Kube-State-Metrics is an agent service that listens to the Kubernetes API and generates metrics about the state of cluster objects, such as deployments, nodes, and pods. Unlike resource metrics (like CPU or memory usage), it provides insights into object-level data, such as the number of replicas or pod status, making it useful for monitoring the desired versus actual state of Kubernetes components. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Awesome Kubernetes Resources !!! ๐Ÿ”ฅ
    ๐Ÿ’škube-state-metrics ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ - kube-state-metrics is a simple service that listens to the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about the state of the objects. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Enhanced Observability for Amazon EKS with CloudWatch Container Insights
    With Kube-State metrics, you get a complete view of the core components and overall health of your Kubernetes clusters. You can monitor the real-time state and quickly identify any issues or bottlenecks. Detailed container-level metrics allow you to visually navigate through different layers of your cluster, making it easier to spot problems like memory leaks in individual containers. This helps you resolve issues... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Prometheus node exporter and cadvisor to send metrics to central prometheus cluster
    Those are entirely different types of data. You can get that from something like kube-state-metrics. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Questions about Kubernetes
    Kubernetes itself will not notify you, the way I've seen people do this, is to use something like kube-state-metrics or node_exporter, export that to Prometheus (or preferrably VictoriaMetrics because Prometheus is terrible IMO), and then setup alarms on that with alertmanager or equivalent, or just look at dashboards regularly with Grafana. Realistically I recommend only setting alerts on disk usage and... Source: over 2 years ago
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Prometheus mentions (285)

  • Istio vs Linkerd: Whatโ€™s the Best Service Mesh + API Gateway?
    Istio's Comprehensive Stack - Istio integrates with a complete Observability ecosystem: Kiali for visualizing service topology, Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, and multiple tracing solutions. This gives you deep visibility into API traffic patterns, though it requires significant configuration effort. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Kubernetes Overview: Container Orchestration & Cloud-Native
    The standard observability stack includes Prometheus for metrics collection, Grafana for visualization, and AlertManager for notifications. For logging, consider Fluent Bit or Fluentd with Elasticsearch or cloud logging services. Jaeger or Zipkin provide distributed tracing for microservices debugging. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Crafting a High-Performance Dashboard with PostgreSQL Caching and Golang Scheduled Routines
    Pro tip: Use a monitoring tool like Prometheus to track refresh times and API response times. Check out Prometheus for setup details. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Autonomous SRE: Revolutionizing Reliability with AI, Automation, and Chaos Engineering
    Tools like Prometheus for metric collection and Grafana for visualization and alerting form the backbone of modern observability stacks, providing the raw data that AI/ML models can then process for predictive insights. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Building an Online Code Compiler: A Complete Guide
    Prometheus - Metrics collection and alerting. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Kube-state-metrics and Prometheus, you can also consider the following products

kops - Founded by Elsa Kopp in 1950, Kopp's Frozen Custard specializes in Milwaukee's best freshly made frozen custard and jumbo burgers.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Kontena Lens - Kontena Lens is an open-source desktop application that comes with a reliable way to manage and monitor Kubernetes clusters.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

K9s - K9s For Warriors is dedicated to providing service canines to our Warriors suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injury and/or military sexual trauma.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources