Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline

What do you like best about the product?

Our mid-sized startup was looking for more than our hyperscaler could provide, but we knew from experience that the big dog in this space would lead to expensive, painful tradeoffs. After (skeptically) evaluating Chronosphere I am happily convinced that there is a better option. My favorite things:

* Support: knowledgeable, friendly support from day one. I assumed this was pre-contract wooing, but one year later, support is as great as ever.
* Ergonomics: tools are only useful if they're used. Their interfaces load quickly and make sense, and as a result, our engineers are happy to use them.
* Operations: the product just works; the undifferentiated heavy lifting is handled behind the scenes, without incident.
* Cost: they include tools to identify and tame anomalous and low-value data, leading to lower costs without sacrificing signal.

What do you dislike about the product?

* Learning PromQL was a little painful. However, ChatGPT is great with PromQL, and that has smoothed the learning curve for new engineers.
* Prometheus histograms are clunky. It sounds like this may be addressed soon.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chronosphere provides our managed backend for observability (metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts). As compared with evaluated alternatives, Chronosphere provides more support, better ergonomics, and more powerful tools to control costs.

What do you like best about the product?

The ability to craft queries, ease of building dashboards and alerting

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI takes some time getting used to.

Additionally some tips for people new to using it like in AWS Cloudwatch insights would be helpful

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Observability and measuring performance of applications under varying loads

What do you like best about the product?

There are a lot of very helpful features such as muting alerts, easy to set up service accounts

What do you dislike about the product?

We recently had an outage where chronosphere wasnt reachable for 2h

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's easy to integrate code with it to create features

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to setup and configure and easy migration of existing Prometheus resources.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nice to have cloud provider integrations.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring and alerting on infrastructure and business-critical applications.

What do you like best about the product?

Chronosphere feels like an observability product that was built for engineers and operators. After seeing costs blow up with competing products while working on observability at previous companies, it's refreshing to see a platform that puts the customer's needs first–especially with managing costs. Data generated by machines at scale can quickly and easily get out of hand, and having flexible controls makes our lives easier.

Early in the onboarding process, I was blown away when we discussed the tools available in the aggregation tier. It appeared that giving us this level of control wouldn't be good for Chronosphere's revenue in the long run, but I soon realized it's part of their philosophy and mission to give the power back to the customers. As an operator coming from an ELK-based stack (which comes with plenty of operational toils), Chronosphere is a true SaaS where you don't need to worry about the underlying storage and query infrastructure.

The profiling tools that allow you to look at incoming data at various process stages have been handy in many cases. The backend ingest and query performance have been phenomenal, especially compared to our legacy stack. Being able to use rollups to extend the retention of data will prove helpful to us in the long run, which isn't something we've been able to do effectively in our legacy stack.

Product aside, the team has been highly supportive throughout the process, from onboarding to implementation to stabilization. They've been a solid partner for the complex project of moving observability stacks within a large engineering organization.

What do you dislike about the product?

We've made good progress with the controls we've been given but still struggle with cardinality explosion on the client side and its impacts on application performance. While battle-tested in production at scale, the Prometheus client library has challenges that require attention and boundaries to prevent misuse and anti-practices. This challenge is exacerbated in large organizations where engineers have varying levels of experience with time series metrics and the concept of cardinality.

This challenge is somewhat outside of the sphere of responsibility of Chronosphere. Like the Chronosphere collector, I think there might be some opportunity for productized tooling on the library side to help solve common problems across all organizations working with Prometheus. Still, on the bright side, the team is working on backend features like the usage profiler to give us the next level of visibility.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chronosphere is helping us collect, monitor, and visualize our application and infrastructure metrics. It allows us to use the open-source Prometheus ecosystem at scale without having to manage the backend.