Thanos: Highly Available, Pluggable, Long Term Metric Storage for Everyone!

Thanos is a highly available, pluggable, long-term metric storage solution that extends Prometheus to enable scaling, highly available setups, and long-term storage for everyone. It also has multiple components that could be used for multi-cluster telemetry, remote writes, and multi-tenancy.

• Prometheus is a popular project for short metric retention and visualization
• Thanos extends Prometheus to enable scaling, highly available setups, and long-term storage
• Thanos has multiple components for multi-cluster telemetry, remote writes, and multi-tenancy
• Thanos is prometheus compatible and has unlimited retention
• The four core components of Thanos are the sidecar, query component, store, and compact components

Thanos allows for a unified way to query all Prometheus clusters, making it easy to gather metrics from multiple sources. It also enables downsampling of data for efficient long-term queries, speeding up the process of visualizing data in Grafana. Additionally, Thanos is capable of storing data on an object store, making it cheap and efficient for unlimited retention.

Prometheus was initially made for short metric retention to answer questions on “what is happening ‘now’”. It is a strong project that solves certain problems really well, but still as a monolith when doing so. Thanos has been made to enable scaling, highly available setups and long term (cheap) storage for Prometheus. Everyone could leverage Thanos for these features. It does not stop there; Thanos has multiple components that could be used for multi-cluster telemetry, remote writes, and multi-tenancy. We want to introduce everyone to Thanos. Explaining the use-cases and how it could benefit your stack now observability becomes such an important factor in tech.