What is Grafana Mimir?
Grafana Mimir is an open-source software project that provides a scalable long-term storage for Prometheus, a popular open-source monitoring and alerting system. With its easy installation and maintenance, massive scalability, global view of metrics, cheap and durable storage, high availability, and native multi-tenancy, Grafana Mimir is a powerful addition to any Prometheus setup.
One of the core strengths of Grafana Mimir is its ease of installation and maintenance. The project’s extensive documentation, tutorials, and deployment tooling make it quick and simple to get started. The monolithic mode of Grafana Mimir allows for the use of just one binary, with no additional dependencies required. Additionally, the best-practice dashboards, alerts, and runbooks packaged with Grafana Mimir make it easy to monitor the health of the system and keep it running smoothly.
Grafana Mimir’s horizontally-scalable architecture enables it to handle large amounts of time series data. Internal testing shows that the system can handle up to 1 billion active time series, allowing for massive scalability. This means that Grafana Mimir can run across multiple machines, resulting in the ability to process orders of magnitude more time series than a single Prometheus instance.
Another key strength of Grafana Mimir is its ability to provide a global view of metrics. The system enables users to run queries that aggregate series from multiple Prometheus instances, giving a comprehensive view of all systems. The query engine also extensively parallelizes query execution, resulting in blazing-fast execution of even the highest-cardinality queries.
Grafana Mimir uses object storage for long-term data storage, taking advantage of this ubiquitous, cost-effective, high-durability technology. The system is compatible with multiple object store implementations, including AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, OpenStack Swift, as well as any S3-compatible object storage. This provides users with a cheap, durable way to store metrics for long-term analysis.
High availability is another key feature of Grafana Mimir. The system replicates incoming metrics, ensuring that no data is lost in the event of machine failure. Its horizontally scalable architecture also means that it can be restarted, upgraded, or downgraded with zero downtime, ensuring no interruptions to metrics ingestion or querying.
Finally, Grafana Mimir’s native multi-tenancy allows for the isolation of data and queries from independent teams or business units, making it possible for these groups to share the same cluster. Advanced limits and quality-of-service controls ensure that capacity is shared fairly among tenants, making it a great option for larger organizations with multiple teams and departments.
Overall, Grafana Mimir is a powerful and versatile system that provides a scalable long-term storage solution for Prometheus. With its easy installation and maintenance, massive scalability, global view of metrics, cheap and durable storage, high availability, and native multi-tenancy, Grafana Mimir is a great addition to any Prometheus setup and can help organizations to easily monitor and analyze their systems’ performance.
