Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Prometheus VS JSON Web Token

Compare Prometheus VS JSON Web Token and see what are their differences

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Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

JSON Web Token logo JSON Web Token

JSON Web Tokens are an open, industry standard RFC 7519 method for representing claims securely between two parties.
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13
  • JSON Web Token Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-19

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.

JSON Web Token features and specs

  • Stateless
    Since JWTs are self-contained, they do not require server-side sessions, enabling stateless authentication and reducing server memory usage.
  • Scalability
    JWTs can easily be used in distributed systems and microservices architectures due to their stateless nature, facilitating horizontal scaling.
  • Decentralized Issuance
    Multiple issuers can create and sign their own tokens, allowing for more decentralized and flexible authentication mechanisms.
  • Performance
    JWTs eliminate the need for database lookups during authenticating requests, as the token contains all the necessary information, which can lead to performance improvements.
  • Cross-domain and Mobile Compatible
    JWTs are widely supported by different platforms and can easily be used in cross-domain situations and with mobile applications.
  • Security
    JWTs can be signed and optionally encrypted, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the data they carry.

Possible disadvantages of JSON Web Token

  • Size
    JWTs tend to be larger than session IDs, which can increase the amount of data transmitted during requests.
  • Expiration Handling
    Managing token expiration can be complex. Once a token is issued, it remains valid until it expires or is explicitly revoked.
  • No Built-in Revocation
    Unlike sessions, JWTs cannot be easily revoked server-side, making it difficult to immediately invalidate tokens without additional mechanisms.
  • Security Risks
    If a JWT is intercepted or compromised, it can be used until it expires. Thus, it should be properly secured and transmitted over HTTPS.
  • Token Overhead
    Embedding too much information in the token payload can lead to performance overhead and potential data exposure risks.
  • Complexity
    Implementing JWT correctly requires a thorough understanding of security practices and token lifecycle management, which can add complexity to the system.

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

JSON Web Token videos

JSON Web Tokens Suck - Randall Degges (DevNet Create 2018)

More videos:

  • Review - JSON Web Tokens with Public Key Signatures
  • Review - RFC 7519 JSON Web Token (JWT), Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Prometheus and JSON Web Token)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Identity Provider
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
Identity And Access Management

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Prometheus and JSON Web Token

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

JSON Web Token Reviews

We have no reviews of JSON Web Token yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

JSON Web Token might be a bit more popular than Prometheus. We know about 300 links to it since March 2021 and only 275 links to Prometheus. 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.

Prometheus mentions (275)

  • Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi Cluster
    Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi cluster is a great way to monitor your Raspberry Pis and gather insightful metrics from them. In this guide, we'll walk through the steps to set up Prometheus with one master node (Pi) and three worker nodes (Pis). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Kubernetes Observability With Kube-State-Metrics
    You must use Prometheus to collect and query Kube-State-Metrics output. The steps to correctly configure Prometheus to scrape Kube-State-Metrics may vary depending on how you installed Prometheus in your cluster. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    In this setup, we are launching the OpenTelemetry Collector with the configuration file otel-collector-config.yaml and exposing its gRPC and HTTP receiver ports on localhost. Also, we are launching Prometheus with the configuration file prometheus.yaml and exposing its UI on localhost. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • 10 Best Cloud Monitoring Tools for 2025
    Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution designed for time-series data, commonly used with Grafana for visualization. This combination is popular among organizations seeking customizable and scalable monitoring solutions, especially in Kubernetes environments. - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
View more

JSON Web Token mentions (300)

  • Guide to JWT API Authentication
    Jwt.io is a great playground to get used to working with JWTs. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
  • Verifying Cognito access tokens - Comparing three JWT packages for Lambda authorizers
    The Lambda authorizer code decodes and verifies the token, and its business logic determines whether the request should proceed to the backend or be denied. Cognito access tokens are JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), and to simplify our coding, we might opt for an external package to handle token verification. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Authentication and Authorization Best Practices in ASP.NET Core
    You can decode the created JWT token using JWT IO web site to see what's inside. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How To Use JWT Token In React JS
    JWT.io – A great resource to decode, verify, and generate JWT tokens. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • 12 Must-Have Online Tools for Every Web Developer in 2025
    Category: Token Debugging & Authentication Link: jwt.io. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Prometheus and JSON Web Token, you can also consider the following products

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

Auth0 - Auth0 is a program for people to get authentication and authorization services for their own business use.

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.

Firebase Authentication - Application and Data, Application Utilities, and User Management and Authentication

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

Spring Security - The Spring portfolio has many projects, including Spring Framework, Spring IO Platform, Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Security...