Britain’s Queen Victoria was well known for her voracious appetite (she liked smoked haddock washed down with a dram of Scotch whisky, apparently), her undying love for Prince Albert and her no-nonsense attitude.
As we know, she was not amused by risque stories and bad behavior.
Equally then, were she with us today, she would clearly be rather unsettled by the existence of enterprise software platform deployments with poor monitoring and observability functionalities.
VictoriaMetrics would have suited the Empress queen perfectly then – save for the fact that the San Francisco start-up actually takes its name from the Roman goddess of victory i.e. the company seeks to help users and enterprise customers declare victory over their thorny data monitoring and observability challenges.
Open source time series monitoring
Queens and Roman deities notwithstanding then, VictoriaMetrics is described as a scalable open source time series database and monitoring solution. The firm used its appearance at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 this month to detail its latest developments.
Insisting that its solutions are simultaneously scalable, reliable, easy to use and cost-efficient, VictoriaMetrics says that its products address the needs of organizations with increasingly complex data volumes and the demand for an ever-better observability platform.
The company notes that it boasts the ‘highest ingestion rates, fastest query performance and smallest disk storage size’ around – but doesn’t specifically qualify that statement further with quantitative specifics.
Fresh as a Victoria sponge cake (Ed, enough with the analogies already), VictoriaMetrics has now announced the release of Managed VictoriaMetrics on AWS Marketplace. The release marks an addition to the company’s core open source offering, which users install, configure and optimize themselves.
Instead, Managed VictoriaMetrics allows users to leverage a ‘production ready’ version of the solution in AWS, completely maintained by the startup’s support team. This promises to slash the complexity of monitoring for businesses, freeing them up from diverting resources to DevOps tasks such as configuration, maintenance, logs collection, software updates and backups.
Keeping monitoring simple
As demand for time-series database monitoring soars, VictoriaMetrics has surpassed 65 million docker pulls, one million GitHub downloads, and 7,000+ GitHub Stars for its open source solution.
Large-scale enterprises such as Ably, Open Cosmos and Semrush are all members of its thriving community.
However, despite the market’s willingness to embrace monitoring, the complexity associated with installing and configuring open source solutions has been a stumbling block for certain organisations. Many businesses lack in-house engineering capabilities or resources to run unique installations of the solution.
“Our open source model provides businesses with the freedom to tailor our solution to their specific needs, said Roman Khavronenko, co-founder of VictoriaMetrics. “However, it requires dedicated teams to support, keep healthy and up to date. A large chunk of the market wants monitoring to ‘just work’ for them from day one – putting data in, getting data out. Through Managed VictoriaMetrics, we remove complexity, leveraging our in-house expertise, and allowing us to provide a more granular level of support for users”
Solving the cost of scale
As the amount of data within organizations skyrockets, the cost of scaling monitoring is a major concern for many businesses. Managed VictoriaMetrics builds on VictoriaMetrics’ core scalability through its pricing structure, which offers no additional costs as throughput increases.
“Costs for the solution are easy to plan upfront since they don’t depend on unexpected changes in workload such as spikes in data ingestion rate, spikes in active time series or spikes in heavy queries. The cost depends only on actual used compute resources – the configured instance type, the requested disk size and network egress bandwidth usage.” said Khavronenko.
Scalability lies at the heart of VictoriaMetrics’ ethos and Managed VictoriaMetrics instances can be scaled up or scaled down in a few clicks. The product can also be used as Managed Prometheus, integrating with the popular monitoring system.
Co-Founders Roman Khavronenko, Artem Navoiev, and Dima Lazerka were in attendance at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 to detail the growth in use cases for time series data and explain how Managed VictoriaMetrics opens up monitoring to all businesses, regardless of size.
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.