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Chronosphere SaaS
Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts you back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud-native complexity, delivering increased business confidence.
Reviews (21)
Arvind Pant
Monitors pipelines with real-time alerts and good documentation
Reviewed on Jul 31, 2024
Review provided by PeerSpot
What is our primary use case?
I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incoming data, our consumption rates, and the time to process each batch. Additionally, we set alerts in Chronosphere for situations like job failures or when the number of processed records falls below a certain threshold. We get alerts if the record count drops below our threshold. Sometimes, we face silent failures, where our system appears to be working fine but isn't consuming any data because another system has stopped sending data. Chronosphere helps us detect these cases.
Another team member was involved in setting up a framework using Terraform on Chronosphere to monitor our job SLAs. We receive alerts on Slack or via email if any job fails to meet its SLA.
What is most valuable?
The alerting features are good because they provide many alerts you can't get with daily tools like Airflow or other orchestration tools, which notify you of job failures. With Chronosphere, I can set custom thresholds, such as the number of records being processed.
I can also configure alerts for silent failures and jobs that take longer than expected. Chronosphere is completely loosely coupled with your pipeline, meaning it has no dependencies on it, which is pretty cool.
What needs improvement?
It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the syntax. Also, I saw the Slack alerts feature, which is pretty cool, but I cannot customize my messages on the Slack alerts. It would be great if it were possible to tag people in the alerts. At DoorDash, we have hundreds of pipelines, and if something fails, I want to tag specific people so they can start working on the issue immediately.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Chronosphere for one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Sometimes, we noticed issues because we used the push method to send our metrics to Chronosphere using Prometheus.
I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
100 users are using this solution, and we have a significant number of metrics coming in. It's highly scalable and can handle the load efficiently.
How are customer service and support?
The documentation is pretty good.
What other advice do I have?
If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with your pipeline, adding no confusion or load. I recommend using it.
Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Health, Wellness and Fitness
An exceptional, pragmatic observability platform
Reviewed on Jul 18, 2023
Review provided by G2
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.
* 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.
* 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.
Computer Software
A solid observability service
Reviewed on Apr 25, 2023
Review provided by G2
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
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
Financial Services
Many features
Reviewed on Apr 25, 2023
Review provided by G2
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
Shailendra L.
Chronosphere as Observability
Reviewed on Mar 21, 2023
Review provided by G2
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.
Arjun N.
A necessary, scalable observability platform run by a stellar team
Reviewed on Mar 16, 2023
Review provided by G2
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.
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.
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.
Kevin Z.
Review from Kevin
Reviewed on Mar 03, 2023
Review provided by G2
What do you like best about the product?
It's very flexible and w ecan use it very easily
What do you dislike about the product?
Promql is hard to use. The query language is very difficult
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use it to monitor our services.
Jeff G.
Scalable metrics storage with M3DB
Reviewed on Feb 24, 2023
Review provided by G2
What do you like best about the product?
The things I appreciate the most about Chronosphere
* Built on industry standards: Prometheus and Grafana
* Uses M3DB for scalable storage
* Customer is not required to manage storage scaling, sharding, or federation
* Knowledgeable, hands-on support by account managers
* Built on industry standards: Prometheus and Grafana
* Uses M3DB for scalable storage
* Customer is not required to manage storage scaling, sharding, or federation
* Knowledgeable, hands-on support by account managers
What do you dislike about the product?
I honestly have experienced no downsides.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Scaling Prometheus storage beyond a single node is a pain. Chronosphere solves this by delivering a managed solution that scales, which saves the time for our Observability team.
Hashim C.
Chronosphere is a company that helps you walk through the complexity of Observability
Reviewed on Feb 23, 2023
Review provided by G2
What do you like best about the product?
Coming from a system with no metrics aggregation, Chronosphere was a breath of fresh air using the Prometheus model to scrape metrics, instantly providing aggregation of metrics and cost savings. The Chronosphere team was and continues to provide excellent support to help with migration and optimize our configuration to maximize utilization and reduce cost.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are a couple of components to cost. Data processing and data persistence. The impact of data processing cost was not realized during the POC with Chronosphere; however, the excellent support provided by Chronosphere helped us mitigate this issue.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As our company scales, our legacy metrics system could not handle the load without aggregation. Chronosphere uses an industry-standard model(Prometheus) with aggregating metrics built in and storing metrics as time series. This makes querying the data faster compared with our legacy system and also saves us money due to the reduction of the total number of data points that persisted
Alec L.
A great tool for metrics at scale
Reviewed on Feb 16, 2023
Review provided by G2
What do you like best about the product?
Aggregation rules are fantastic, especially if you run a large fleet (for example, aggregating away the instance/pod labels from histograms on ingest makes them much cheaper to store). Drop rules are a lifesaver when someone adds a bad metric and you need to stop it ASAP.
Their internal observability tooling is great. Their profiler is excellent for discovering cost-saving opportunities (by adding aggregation or drop rules). They also provide out-of-the-box dashboards for understanding how you are using the system, which helps answer questions like "how much of my limit is being used by job X?"
Extremely fast to query.
Very easy to onboard if you're already using Prometheus. The chronosphere collector is mostly compatible with existing Prometheus configs, and their frontend can import any of your existing Grafana dashboards.
Wonderful support. The Chronosphere team has been fantastic, not just during the implementation phase but also afterward. They've also been great at surfacing non-obvious issues to us in places where they haven't quite automated everything yet (for example, misconfigured notifiers and alerts).
Their internal observability tooling is great. Their profiler is excellent for discovering cost-saving opportunities (by adding aggregation or drop rules). They also provide out-of-the-box dashboards for understanding how you are using the system, which helps answer questions like "how much of my limit is being used by job X?"
Extremely fast to query.
Very easy to onboard if you're already using Prometheus. The chronosphere collector is mostly compatible with existing Prometheus configs, and their frontend can import any of your existing Grafana dashboards.
Wonderful support. The Chronosphere team has been fantastic, not just during the implementation phase but also afterward. They've also been great at surfacing non-obvious issues to us in places where they haven't quite automated everything yet (for example, misconfigured notifiers and alerts).
What do you dislike about the product?
Prometheus/PromQL (which Chronosphere is based on) is still a complex system to learn. If you're already using it, Chronosphere is a fantastic drop-in replacement for Prometheus. However, if you or your users are new, expect to take some time learning the language and data model. If you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to make a query that looks mostly right but isn't quite.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chronosphere has allowed us to monitor our applications and infrastructure at scale.