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DataDog is a proprietary monitoring software that offers infrastructure, server, networking, and application monitoring. However, engineers are coming across the same problems with DataDog over and over again, such as vendor lock-in, steep learning curve on the UI, frequent use of proprietary and non-reusable concepts, and surprising hidden costs.
Hosted Prometheus by MetricFire has a fully open system, with no data lock-in, because it is built with open-source Prometheus at its heart. This article will take a look at why using Hosted Prometheus by MetricFire can improve your monitoring experience and offer more functionality.
What is MetricFire?
MetricFire is an infrastructure and applications monitoring platform built on a suite of open-source tools. The platform allows you to use either Hosted Prometheus or Hosted Graphite, and have your metrics displayed on aesthetically-pleasing Grafana dashboards. To use MetricFire, all you have to do is send metrics to the platform, then MetricFire does the rest. You can visualize, monitor, analyze, query, and set up notifications all directly in the MetricFire platform.
Check out the MetricFire free trial to see exactly what the platform looks like. Send metrics and visualize on Grafana without any local setup of the open-source projects.
Open-source foundations means constant development
MetricFire is built on open-source technology that is being constantly developed and used by a large community of software engineers. This means that MetricFire continuously integrates the best of open-source technology into the product offering. As the community improves and adds to the open-source products, MetricFire takes on these changes and improves upon our offering. Our products all have large open-source communities with a lot of momentum, so MetricFire is a future-proofed monitoring investment.
Open-source foundations means extensive plugins
Being open-source means that developers all over the world are developing agents everyday for various operating systems and software because they want to collect those metrics for visualization. As a result, Prometheus users can apply these agents and collect metrics from all their devices immediately by installing these agents at no cost. Just like an engineer using the open-source project, MetricFire’s Hosted Prometheus users can also save a lot of time and energy by applying these community-built agents. The MetricFire team can help set up these integrations and give consultations wherever needed.
MetricFire also integrates with major cloud solutions like AWS, and Heroku, so our Hosted Prometheus users can easily collect metrics from apps deployed on those cloud solutions as well.
Open-source foundations means easy-to-find employees
If you’re using Prometheus, Graphite or Grafana in your company, chances are your employees have heard of it, and have already tried using it. And if this isn’t the case, finding people who know how to use these open-source projects isn’t hard. You can easily hire and drop-in a SRE/software engineer from the job market, as most of them are already familiar with the technology.
MetricFire improves on the open-source technology
As MetricFire is a corporation dedicated to monitoring, we have the resources to improve upon the open-source projects. Here are some of the ways we improve upon Graphite, Prometheus, and Grafana:
Alerting: Open-source Graphite doesn’t come equipped with Alerting. At MetricFire, we built a central Graphite alerting service, which is faster, and more reliable than the oft-used but difficult-to-manage Grafana alerting.
Unified monitoring: Graphite and Prometheus are two separate monitoring technologies. We host both technologies for you and offer a unified and seamless UI to access both. No more forcing all your monitoring needs into a single technology; no more square pegs, round holes.
Awesome team dashboards: Graphite and Prometheus only have out-of-box barebones graphing tools. We integrate both with hosted Grafana to give everyone in your team access to great Grafana dashboards.
Out-of-box dashboards: Upon account creation, or installation of our plugins (AWS, Heroku, etc.), dashboards magically appear to get you going quickly.
Long-term storage: No more sleepless nights worrying if your Graphite or Prometheus will collapse when it runs out of disk space or storage. We auto-scale horizontally while you sleep.
MetricFire is agile
MetricFire is an agile company that is able to work closely with our enterprise customers to incorporate their needs into our roadmap. Our customers’ needs define the direction that MetricFire will go. We are looking to build features that you need, that you can’t find anywhere else. We can immediately offer a level of customization that is impossible to find at larger vendors.
Try the MetricFire free trial to see what our platform can do. You can also book a demo and talk to us directly about monitoring at your company. For more interesting topics related to monitoring and data visualization, check out MetricFire.com/blog for more articles.
