We did a few shows with Rob about monitoring and time series:
<a href="https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/21/time-series-databases-with-rob-skillington/" rel="nofollow">https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/21/time-series-...</a>
<a href="https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/02/12/ubers-monitoring-platform-with-rob-skillington/" rel="nofollow">https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/02/12/ubers-monito...</a>
Congrats on the launch, Chronosphere is joining a fast-growing club of monitoring (and related) spinoffs from large Bay Area tech companies:<p>Uber -> Chronosphere
Google -> Lightstep
Facebook -> Honeycomb
Twitter -> Buoyant (and Zipkin, OSS)
What I am not getting from my superficial knowledge is that why is Prometheus getting so much traction over elastic search. Elastic search claims to be as good for metrics and events. The ES database itself is more advanced with eventual consistency and search capability. It can do log analytics and it can be backend to tracing tool like Jaeger. Why so much investment in Prometheus. Disclaimer: I have not used Prometheus too much myself.
The technical details of their software are described in <a href="https://eng.uber.com/m3/" rel="nofollow">https://eng.uber.com/m3/</a><p>This looks like a competitor to Cortex (<a href="https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/12/18/cortex-a-multi-tenant-horizontally-scalable-prometheus-as-a-service/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/12/18/cortex-a-multi-tenant-ho...</a>).
> Chronoshere, a startup from two ex-Uber engineers, who helped create the open source M3 monitoring project to handle Uber-level scale, officially launched today with the goal of building a commercial company on top of the open source project.<p>I recall a thread here from 2-3 weeks ago about how “Uber-scale” wasn’t really Uber scale, and that most of these publicized “Uber-scale” projects ended up getting canned internally. Any insider insight to this M3 project?
Congrats Martin and Rob on the launch. M3 is one of the best tools I used at Uber. Something which just works. I'm sure you guys will be successful as I first hand witnessed the value it brings to an organization.
Hey Rob a co-founder and M3DB creator here, more than happy to answer any queries anyone might have. We're committed on continuing M3 being 100% apache 2 licensed, clustering and all other M3 features included. We're focused on providing reliable metrics hosting at scale.
Is the name inspired by the building in C&C Red Alert by any chance?<p><a href="https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Chronosphere_(Red_Alert_3)" rel="nofollow">https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Chronosphere_(Red_Alert_3)</a><p>That’s my personal reference to the word, but searching around a bit, it seems that it was registered as a trademark by a medical company already in 1991, 5 years before Red Alert.<p><a href="https://trademark.trademarkia.com/chronosphere-74147725.html" rel="nofollow">https://trademark.trademarkia.com/chronosphere-74147725.html</a>
Congrats on the launch!<p>Metrics monitoring is hugely useful for figuring out what's going wrong (or right...) and where - especially when you can slice and dice by dimensions/tags. Microsoft (where I work) uses lots of metrics internally, for every sevice. It's nice to see M3/Chronosphere making this kind of thing more affordable and widely accessible.
One thing that I often miss when reading about this stuff is benchmarks. So it's faster than Prometheus? Prove it. So it's faster than Postgres, or TimescaleDB? Prove it.<p>It should be trivial, and the fact that it's not there and what you find instead is terms like "Uber-scale" is slightly worrying.<p>I'm not trying to take anything away from the achievements made here by the guys at Uber, but anyone seriously considering using this in production would probably need a better contrastive comparison between alternatives.
> There weren’t any tools available on the market that could handle Uber’s scaling requirements<p>This isn't a problem that you can build a business around.<p>Edit: Ah, I get it. This is like a Mesosphere play--they're shepherding the M3 technology in the open source ecosystem and offering a commercial version. That makes more sense.
Splunk kool-aid drinker here; pardon my ignorant question, but why not just use Splunk?<p>Actually I think my real question is, why are there such a proliferation of these monitoring/logging/visualization -AAS startups? Who are the target customers, in terms of spends?
Congrats on the launch Rob and Martin. M3 is an amazing product which I had the privilege to use at Uber. Wish you two the best for your journey ahead!