[matthewtse]

It's interesting to me how Prometheus came to dominate the metrics ecosystem over the past decade.

When I first encountered it, I had a visceral reaction against it, primary over: 1) The PromQL query language is really not intuitive. I've been using it for years and I still stick to really simple joins to keep myself out of hot water 2) Being forced to use rate() on counter metrics was a really big initial barrier against one of the presumably simpler things a metrics system should handle. See this popular long blog post explaining what Prometheus Counters are: https://www.robustperception.io/how-does-a-prometheus-counte...

But complicated rate() and counters were a symptom of the killer feature about Prometheus, that it was a pull-based rather than push-based model. This meant you could easily re-deploy subcomponents of your metrics system, getting rid of the hair-raising stop-the-world updates that we used to have to do with graphite.