Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Thanos.io VS Apache SkyWalking

Compare Thanos.io VS Apache SkyWalking and see what are their differences

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Thanos.io logo Thanos.io

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

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.
  • Thanos.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21

Thanos.io features and specs

  • Global View
    Thanos provides a global view of all your Prometheus metrics, allowing you to query across multiple clusters and data sources seamlessly.
  • High Availability
    Thanos enables high availability by providing redundancy and failover for data queries, ensuring continuous access to metric data even if one or more Prometheus instances fail.
  • Long-term Storage
    Thanos offers long-term storage for Prometheus metrics, allowing users to store data efficiently beyond the retention period offered by Prometheus.
  • Scalability
    Designed to scale horizontally, Thanos can handle increased workloads and large volumes of data, accommodating growing environments.
  • Compatibility
    Thanos is fully compatible with Prometheus, which means you can integrate it without changing your existing Prometheus setup.

Possible disadvantages of Thanos.io

  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing Thanos can be complex compared to a standalone Prometheus installation, requiring additional components and configurations.
  • Resource Intensive
    Thanos can be resource-intensive, necessitating more storage and compute resources to handle data deduplication and global querying effectively.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers and operations teams may face a learning curve in adopting Thanos, requiring time to understand its architecture and best practices.
  • Network Overhead
    Using Thanos can introduce network overhead due to data being transferred across clusters and remote storage solutions, potentially impacting performance.
  • Dependency Management
    Implementing Thanos adds more components and dependencies to an infrastructure, which can lead to increased management and maintenance efforts.

Apache SkyWalking features and specs

  • Comprehensive Observability
    Apache SkyWalking provides end-to-end observability of distributed systems including service, process, and container metrics, as well as logs and events, enabling holistic monitoring and performance optimization.
  • Distributed Tracing
    SkyWalking offers robust distributed tracing capabilities that allow users to trace requests end-to-end across various services and platforms, aiding in root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project under the Apache umbrella, SkyWalking benefits from community contributions, regular updates, and improvements, offering transparency and flexibility.
  • Wide Protocol Support
    SkyWalking supports a wide range of protocols and platforms, such as HTTP, gRPC, Dubbo, and supports multiple languages including Java, .NET, Python, and more, making it versatile across different tech stacks.
  • Dashboarding and Visualization
    The platform provides powerful dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to easily interpret data, create custom dashboards, and derive insights from visual metrics.

Possible disadvantages of Apache SkyWalking

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up and configuring SkyWalking can be complex, especially for organizations unfamiliar with distributed observability tools, potentially requiring significant time and expertise.
  • Scalability Challenges
    While SkyWalking is designed for distributed systems, scaling its deployment for very large environments might present challenges, necessitating careful architectural planning.
  • Resource Intensive
    SkyWalking can be resource-intensive, as it collects a large amount of telemetry data, which might lead to high overhead on system resources like CPU and memory.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing SkyWalking, particularly for new users.
  • Limited UI Customization
    The user interface, while functional, offers limited customization options compared to some commercial observability solutions, which might be a limitation for users needing highly tailored dashboards.

Thanos.io videos

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Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Thanos.io and Apache SkyWalking)
Dev Ops
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
35 35%
65% 65
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Thanos.io should be more popular than Apache SkyWalking. It has been mentiond 32 times since March 2021. 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.

Thanos.io mentions (32)

  • Top 10 Prometheus Alternatives in 2024 [Includes Open-Source]
    Thanos is a set of components that can be added to an existing Prometheus deployment to enable long-term storage and global query view. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Scaling Prometheus with Thanos
    Started in November 2017, Thanos is an open-source CNCF incubating project with over 12.8k stars on GitHub. Built on top of Prometheus, Thanos aims to provide a highly available Prometheus environment with long-term storage support and a global view of metrics. Companies like Disney, Abode, eBay, SoundCloud, and ByteDance use Thanos for monitoring at scale. However, setting up Thanos can be complex and requires... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Fastly and the Linux kernel
    The open source projects Fastly uses and the foundations we partner with are vital to Fastly’s mission and success. Here's an unscientific list of projects and organizations supported by the Linux Foundation that we use and love include: The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, containerd, eBPF, Falco, OpenAPI Initiative, ESLint, Express, Fastify, Lodash, Mocha, Node.js, Prometheus, Jenkins, OpenTelemetry, Envoy, etcd, Helm,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Looking for a way to remote in to K's of raspberry pi's...
    Monitoring = netdata on each RPi https://www.netdata.cloud/ binded to the vpn interface being scraped into a prometeus thaons https://thanos.io/ setup with grafana to give management the Green all is good screens (very important). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Monitoring multiple kubernetes cluster with single Prometheus operator
    Sounds like you want something like Thanos. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

Apache SkyWalking mentions (18)

  • I gave up on self-hosted Sentry
    A good APM tool I’ve been using for a few years is Apache Skywalking: https://skywalking.apache.org/ It might not do everything Sentry does but it definitely has helped with tracking down some issues, even production ones and runs in a fairly manageable setup (in comparison to how long even the Sentry self-hosted Docker Compose file is). What’s more, if you want, you can even use regular PostgreSQL as the backing... - Source: Hacker News / 18 days ago
  • OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code
    > I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty. For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml but it's not exactly ideal either. I wonder what other good options are out there, something... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Release Radar · May 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Thanos.io and Apache SkyWalking, you can also consider the following products

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

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

OpenCensus - Application and Data, Monitoring, and Monitoring Tools

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Cortex Project - Horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.

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.