Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vladvasiliu 1543 days ago
While I agree with your point in the general case, would you mind elaborating on the specific case of Prometheus?

My understanding is that the recommended best-practice for Prometheus is to deploy as many of them as necessary, as close to the monitored infrastructure as possible.

What use case would require deploying a single Mimir, so supposedly Prometheus (cluster) in the case of serving multiple tenants? Why not just deploy a dedicated Prometheus / Mimir stack per client?

1 comments

I don't know Prometheus, but I would imagine the answer depends on just how many clients you have. Probably doesn't matter if you're talking just a few. If it's a lot, then separate instances can be very expensive in terms of operational complexity and waste due to resource fragmentation. Multi-tenancy is good for bringing both of those back under control. Is there something about Prometheus that would negate that?
For one, it doesn't really support authentication (although it's on the roadmap).

I'm no Prometheus expert, but since you're pretty much expected to be running a bunch of servers anyway, the operational complexity has to be handled even for just one client.

You do have a point on resource fragmentation, but IME Prometheus' resource usage is fairly predictable, so you could probably mitigate that to a point.