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VictoriaMetrics
Histograms compatible with Prometheus
Documentation makes a statement on Prometheus histograms support.
Why Histogram buckets contain vmrange labels instead of le labels like in Prometheus histograms?
Buckets with vmrange labels occupy less disk space compared to Promethes-style buckets with le labels, because vmrange buckets don't include counters for the previous ranges. VictoriaMetrics provides prometheus_buckets function, which converts vmrange buckets to Prometheus-style buckets with le labels. This is useful for building heatmaps in Grafana. Additionally, its' histogram_quantile function transparently handles histogram buckets with vmrange labels.
While I appreciate the new way of exposing and storing histogram data with vmrange, the lack of of support for le histograms reduces applicability of this library.
As a developer I'm not entirely happy with standard prometheus client (for a variety of reasons from clumsy API to protobuf dependencies) and I would like to use metrics instead, but as a developer I don't have control of what kind of technology is provided by infrastructure (Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, etc..).
Unfortunately lack of support for le histograms makes this client incompatible with Prometheus scraper/db.
Hopefully the decision about additionally supporting le histograms can be reconsidered, so that metrics works nicely with a variety of scrapers/db.
Maybe that would also help for better adoption of VictoriaMetrics as applications may have a smoother transition by integrating metrics client first and switching scraper/db technology later.
