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by the_evacuator 3186 days ago
Not really. I just think it’s funny to see it described by one groups as a reasonable or even state-of-the-art system, while another group describes it as brain damage from ten years ago.
2 comments

Borgmon being "brain damage" or some kind of "horror show" is more a meme than a serious opinion held by people who have used Borgmon.

Personally I'm very happy that the open source world is adopting something derived from Borgmon rather than something derived from its supposed "replacement".

Yup, I've had more than one current Google SRE state "You can have my Borgmon when you pry it from my cold dead hands.".

Borgmon may be dead in the eyes of some people, but I know for a fact that it's still the only thing monitoring core and critical systems.

Most of the problem with Borgmon, IMO, is the cruft that has built up over the decade+, and neglect due to the Google pattern of "The new thing that doesn't work, and the old thing that is deprecated.".

The difficulty at Google is that developers are rewarded for writing new and shiny from scratch, rather than fix the old but working systems.

This isn't always a problem, as some good things can come out of starting from scratch. But sometimes they throw out too many of the good ideas, in an attempt to be fancy and new.

I have heard unflattering things about it from a few different ex-Google SREs, specifically about the macro system and it being cumbersome to use.
You will note that Prometheus explicitly does not have a macro system.
Oh sure, I was responding to the OP stating that criticism of Borgmon was more a meme than reality.

It wasn't meant to be commentary on Prometheus(which I quite like) at all :)

It's pretty normal when you consider that google is 10 years ahead of almost every other company when it comes to infrastructure.
> is 10 years ahead of almost every other company when it comes to infrastructure.

For Google-scale orgs or infrastructure needs. Most everyone else in the world does not need Google scale tools.

Google needs are extremely common. Take a look at any Fortune 500 and and it could usually benefit greatly from a lot of the infrastructure that powers google.

Most of them do run their own datacenters, sometimes in numerous locations, they have massive and extremely complex IT systems in place.