Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Prometheus VS OpenCensus

Compare Prometheus VS OpenCensus and see what are their differences

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

OpenCensus logo OpenCensus

Application and Data, Monitoring, and Monitoring Tools
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13
  • OpenCensus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-25

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

OpenCensus videos

Custom metrics with OpenCensus

More videos:

  • Review - OpenTelemetry: Overview & Backwards Compatibility of OpenTracing + OpenCensus - Steve Flanders
  • Review - OpenTelemetry: Overview & Backwards Compatibility of OpenTracing + OpenCensus - Steve Flanders

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Prometheus and OpenCensus)
Monitoring Tools
97 97%
3% 3
Dev Ops
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
Performance Monitoring

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 OpenCensus

Prometheus Reviews

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
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
This list won’t be complete without including two fantastic open-source solutions – Prometheus and Grafana. Its DIY solution where you use Prometheus to scrape the metrics from server, OS, applications and use Grafana to visualize them.
Source: geekflare.com

OpenCensus Reviews

We have no reviews of OpenCensus yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus seems to be a lot more popular than OpenCensus. While we know about 225 links to Prometheus, we've tracked only 13 mentions of OpenCensus. 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 (225)

  • Release Radar · April 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    It's like Prometheus, but for logs. Okay it's not really to do with the Norse or Greek gods, instead Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by the open source project Prometheus. Built by Grafana Labs, Loki is designed for ease of use. Instead of indexing the contents of the logs, Loki provides a set of labels for each log stream. The latest update includes... - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • Tools for frontend monitoring with Prometheus
    Developers widely use Prometheus as a system for operational monitoring and alerting for their projects. Here is a list of tools for monitoring frontend services with Prometheus. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • On Implementation of Distributed Protocols
    Distributed system administrators need mechanisms and tools for monitoring individual nodes in order to analyze the system and promptly detect anomalies. Developers also need effective mechanisms for analyzing, diagnosing issues, and identifying bugs in protocol implementations. Logging, tracing, and collecting metrics are common observability techniques to allow monitoring and obtaining diagnostic information... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    Setting up monitoring for a system, especially one involving GRPC communication, provides crucial visibility into its operations. In this guide, we walked through the steps to instrument both a GRPC server and client with Prometheus metrics, exposed those metrics via an HTTP endpoint, and visualized them using Grafana. The Docker-Compose setup simplified the deployment of both Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring a... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry Explained
    Alerting and Notification: Select a tool with flexible alerting mechanisms to proactively detect anomalies or deviations from defined thresholds. Consider asking questions like "Does this tool offer customizable alerting options and support notification channels that suit our team's communication preferences?" A tool like Prometheus provides robust alerting capabilities. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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OpenCensus mentions (13)

  • OpenTelemetry Journey #01 - Important concepts
    First of all, let's start with the basics. There are some important concepts to be clarified before we dive into the OpenTelemetry world. The vast majority of the naming conventions and concepts are from projects and papers that inspired OpenTelemetry, such as OpenTracing, OpenCensus and Dapper. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • OpenTelemetry Journey #00 - Introduction to OpenTelemetry
    OpenTelemetry it's a result from the merge of two important projects that are now archived: OpenTracing and OpenCensus. The project is incubated in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has a strong community behind it. The CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation and hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. Currently, OpenTelemetry is the second... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry - Part I
    OpenTelemetry was born from the merger of two other standards that decided to unify forces instead of competing with each other; these projects were OpenTracing and OpenCensus. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Google Cloud Reference
    OpenCensus: Cloud native observability framework 🔗Link. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Tracing Gorm queries with OpenCensus & Google Cloud Tracing
    At incident.io we use gorm.io as the ORM library for our Postgres database, it's a really powerful tool and one I'm very glad for after years of working with hand-rolled SQL in Go & Postgres apps. You may have seen from our other blog posts that we're heavily invested in tracing, specifically with Google Cloud Tracing via OpenCensus libraries. A huge amount of our application's time is spent talking to Postgres... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Prometheus and OpenCensus, you can also consider the following products

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

OpenTracing - Consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing and context propagation.

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.

Thanos.io - Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.

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

Metricbeat - Download Metricbeat, the open source tool for shipping metrics from operating systems and services such as Apache web server, Redis, NGINX, and more.