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Prometheus VS Redis

Compare Prometheus VS Redis and see what are their differences

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Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Redis logo Redis

Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13
  • Redis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-19

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes with radius queries and streams. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.

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.

Redis features and specs

  • Performance
    Redis is an in-memory data store, which allows it to provide extremely fast read and write operations. This makes it ideal for applications requiring real-time interactions.
  • Data Structures
    Redis offers a variety of data structures, such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets. This flexibility helps developers manage data more efficiently in different scenarios.
  • Scalability
    Redis supports horizontal scalability with features like clustering and partitioning, allowing for easy scaling as your application grows.
  • Persistence
    Though primarily an in-memory store, Redis provides options for data persistence, such as RDB snapshots and AOF logs, enabling data durability across reboots.
  • Pub/Sub Messaging
    Redis includes a built-in publish/subscribe messaging system, which can be used to implement real-time messaging and notifications.
  • Simple API
    Redis has a simple and intuitive API, which can speed up development time and make it easier to integrate Redis into various application stacks.
  • Atomic Operations
    Redis supports atomic operations on data structures, reducing the complexity of concurrent programming and making it easier to maintain data consistency.

Possible disadvantages of Redis

  • Memory Usage
    Being an in-memory data store, Redis can become expensive in terms of memory usage, especially when working with large datasets.
  • Data Persistence Limitations
    While Redis offers data persistence, it is not as robust as traditional databases. There can be data loss in certain configurations, such as when using asynchronous persistence methods.
  • Complexity in Scaling
    Although Redis supports clustering, setting up and managing a Redis cluster can be complex and may require significant DevOps expertise.
  • Single-threaded Nature
    Redis operates on a single-threaded event loop, which can become a bottleneck for certain workloads that could benefit from multi-threading.
  • Limited Query Capabilities
    Compared to traditional relational databases, Redis offers limited querying capabilities. Complex queries and joins are not supported natively.
  • License
    As of Redis 6 and higher, the Redis modules are under the Server Side Public License (SSPL), which may be restrictive for some use cases compared to more permissive open-source licenses.

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Redis videos

Improve your Redis developer experience with RedisInsight, Redis Labs

More videos:

  • Review - What is Redis? | Why and When to use Redis? | Tech Primers
  • Review - Redis Labs "Why NoSQL is a Safe Bet"
  • Review - Redis Enterprise Overview with Yiftach Shoolman - Redis Labs
  • Review - Redis system design | Distributed cache System design
  • Review - What is Redis and What Does It Do?
  • Review - Redis Sorted Sets Explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Prometheus and Redis)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
NoSQL Databases
0 0%
100% 100

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 Redis

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

Redis Reviews

Redis Alternative for App Performance | Gigaspaces
Redis offers a RESTful API for accessing data stored within its in-memory technology data structures. This API provides a simple and efficient way to interact with Redis, enabling developers to leverage its capabilities seamlessly in their applications. Developers also need to manage the Redis cached data lifecycle, it’s the application responsibility to store the data &...
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
A notable challenge with Redis Streams is that it doesn't natively support distributed, horizontal scaling. Also, while Redis is famous for its speed and simplicity, managing and scaling a Redis installation may be complex for some users, particularly for persistent data workloads.
Source: blog.iron.io
Redis vs. KeyDB vs. Dragonfly vs. Skytable | Hacker News
1. Redis: I'll start with Redis which I'd like to call the "original" key/value store (after memcached) because it is the oldest and most widely used of all. Being a long-time follower of Redis, I do know it's single-threaded (and uses io-threads since 6.0) and hence it achieves lesser throughput than the other stores listed above which are multi-threaded, at least to some...
Memcached vs Redis - More Different Than You Would Expect
Remember when I wrote about how Redis was using malloc to assign memory? I lied. While Redis did use malloc at some point, these days Redis actually uses jemalloc. The reason for this is that jemalloc, while having lower peak performance has lower memory fragmentation helping to solve the framented memory issues that Redis experiences.
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Redis is a known, open-source, in-memory data structure store that offers different data structures like lists, strings, hashes, sets, bitmaps, streams, geospatial indexes, etc. It is best utilized as a cache, memory broker, and cache. It has optional durability and inbuilt replication potential. It offers a great deal of availability through Redis Sentinel and Redis Cluster.

Social recommendations and mentions

Prometheus might be a bit more popular than Redis. We know about 273 links to it since March 2021 and only 216 links to Redis. 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 (273)

View more

Redis mentions (216)

  • Finding Bigfoot with Async Generators + TypeScript
    Of course, these examples are just toys. A more proper use for asynchronous generators is handling things like reading files, accessing network services, and calling slow running things like AI models. So, I'm going to use an asynchronous generator to access a networked service. That service is Redis and we'll be using Node Redis and Redis Query Engine to find Bigfoot. - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • Caching Isn’t Always the Answer – And Here’s Why
    Slap on some Redis, sprinkle in a few set() calls, and boom—10x faster responses. - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    Real-time serving: Many push processed data into low-latency serving layers like Redis to power applications needing instant responses (think fraud detection, live recommendations, financial dashboards). - Source: dev.to / 23 days ago
  • Setup a Redis Cluster using Redis Stack
    Redis® Cluster is a fully distributed implementation with automated sharding capabilities (horizontal scaling capabilities), designed for high performance and linear scaling up to 1000 nodes. . - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Modern Web Development Sucks? How PostgreSQL Can Replace Your Tech Stack
    Instead of spinning up Redis, use an unlogged table in PostgreSQL for fast, ephemeral storage. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

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.

ArangoDB - A distributed open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values.

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

Apache Cassandra - The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance.