Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

Time series databases

It all starts with the need to collect, store, and query measurements over time. When dealing with massive amounts of data from collectors and sensors (such as those that make up the Internet of Things), querying the resulting datasets is extremely slow if the database isn't designed with that use case in mind. Nothing prevents you from using standard relational or NoSQL databases to store time series data, but the performance penalty and scalability concerns should make you ponder on that decision. Prometheus chose to implement a time series database that was tailored to its unique problem space.

Besides the write-heavy aspect of these types of databases, which in turn implies the storage of a massive volume of measurements, ...