Elasticsearch is a great piece of technology and its very versatile which makes it a great fit for a lot of problems (Uber, where M3 was developed, is a heavy consumer of Elasticsearch for logging purposes for example), but for the types of metrics workloads and scale that M3/Prometheus were designed for Elasticsearch simply wouldn't work.
In fact M3 uses FST index segments, a common Apache Lucene segment which is used by ElasticSearch, for secondary index metric name and dimension full-text search capabilities: https://github.com/m3db/m3/tree/master/src/m3ninx/index/segm...
er, crap, i've outed myself
This looks like a competitor to Cortex (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/12/18/cortex-a-multi-tenant-ho...).
[1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/
[2] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/wiki/Exte...
[3] https://medium.com/@valyala/measuring-vertical-scalability-f...
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?
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.
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.
Benchmarks tend to favor the authors and are frequently game-ified, look at GPU benchmarks like 3DMark that frequently had manufacturers release optimizations that were really only utilized in specific benchmarks.
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?
Uber -> Chronosphere Google -> Lightstep Facebook -> Honeycomb Twitter -> Buoyant (and Zipkin, OSS)
https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Chronosphere_(Red_Alert_3)
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.
https://trademark.trademarkia.com/chronosphere-74147725.html
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.
This isn't a problem that you can build a business around.
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.
