Metrics Logging

[mike_r_black]

I'm researching monitoring and metric solutions for Neo4j. What can people say about Graphite vs. Prometheus? Since I'm not using either and starting fresh, is there a preference on which I should choose?

[tom_geudens]

Hello Mike,

Here's a couple of points that can influence your decision :

• Graphite has been along for quite a while (2006) as the no-thrills solid open source solution. Prometheus has been around since 2012 and is considered to be somewhat of a rebel, it's open source as well but actually challenging the commercial offerings in the arena (and with quite a bit of success)

• Graphite has a push model ... metrics are pushed to a graphite server. Prometheus has a pull model, when you activate it the Neo4j server exposes an extra endpoint and you connect your prometheus server to that.

• Both are easy to install (and well documented). Graphite is Linux-centered (couldn't - myself - get it set up on Windows), Prometheus seems not to care about the platform (worked in minutes on either OS).

• Both can be easily integrated with several visualization tools, Grafana being the most prominent one in the open source space.

So, it's a close call (there's an obvious reason we support both of them now) and as always the consultants answer is it depends on your usecase. If you have a complete green field situation, you can't actually make a wrong choice here.

Hope this helps,

Regards,
Tom

[mike_r_black]

Just wanted to share that I went with a Prometheus + Grafana setup. It was simpler than what I thought it was going to be to get everything up and working.

Now the hard part, choosing what to have on the dashboard. If anyone has any PromQL/Dashboards they'd like to share, I'd be interested in seeing them. Looks like I have some PromQL learning to do.