Technology Radar
We've moved VictoriaMetrics to Adopt because it has matured into a reliable choice for organizations operating large-scale, self-managed observability platforms. As a high-performance, open-source time-series database, it handles high-volume and high-cardinality metrics workloads that can challenge Prometheus. In one of our projects, a VictoriaMetrics cluster handles five million samples per second with 20 to 30 labels per metric, demonstrating its suitability for large-scale deployments.
The platform offers a straightforward single-node version for smaller workloads as well as a clustered architecture that separates ingestion, querying and storage into independently scalable components. It integrates with existing observability architectures by supporting native OpenTelemetry ingestion, Prometheus APIs and remote write support, allowing teams to adopt it without replacing their existing instrumentation and dashboards. Whether used as long-term storage behind Prometheus or as a complete metrics stack with components such as vmagent and vmalert, VictoriaMetrics is a compelling option for infrastructure where retention, cardinality or cost has become a challenge.
Modern observability relies on collecting and aggregating an exhaustive set of granular metrics to fully understand, predict and analyze system behavior. But when applied to a cloud native system composed of many redundant and cooperating processes and hosts, the cardinality (or number of unique time series) becomes unwieldy because it grows exponentially with each additional service, container, node, cluster, etc. When dealing with high-cardinality data, we've found that VictoriaMetrics performs well. VictoriaMetrics is particularly useful for operating Kubernetes-hosted microservice architectures, and the VictoriaMetrics operator makes it easy for teams to implement their own monitoring in a self-service way. We also like its componentized architecture and ability to continue collecting metrics even when the central server is unavailable. Although our team has been happy with VictoriaMetrics, this is a rapidly evolving area, and we'd recommend keeping an eye on other high-performance, Prometheus-compatible time series databases such as Cortex or Thanos.
