Open source biz promises to slash bills with observability-as-a-service in the cloud

AWS first, others to follow

VictoriaMetrics has become the latest open source company to offer a hosted product, claiming around five times the savings for customers.

It's an eye-catching figure for the observability software company and one that Ivan Yatskevich, VP of Product at VictoriaMetrics, defended as being the worst-case scenario when comparing the data ingestion rate for the service versus those of the competition.

VictoriaMetrics has, until now, been a roll-your-own solution for observability. There's a free version as well as something more suited to enterprises, with support, beefed-up authentication and security, and automated backups, among other features.

The cloud option means that VictoriaMetrics will handle hosting, describing it as "Observability-as-a-service." It is, however, only available on AWS at the moment. GCP and Azure are on the roadmap, but for now, hosting is taken care of in Amazon's cloud.

Then there's the thorny issue of where all that observability data is being held. VictoriaMetrics gave us examples of customers having one deployment for data from the EU and another from the rest of the world. Still, thought will need to be given to ensure compliance is maintained.

In addition, not all AWS regions are supported, although VictoriaMetrics said it was more than willing to work with customers with specific needs to enable new regions.

The company has also paid attention to customers' worries about the transfer cost when shoveling all that observability data into AWS. Artem Navoiev, one of Victoria Metrics' co-founders, acknowledged the concerns. "Traffic can play a huge role in your billing," he said.

While the company has emphasized efforts to minimize those costs through its implementation, customers must still pay for external traffic, although Navoiev insisted "it's a really small portion, compared to the amount of data that people write versus the data that people read, because observability is mostly about the writing."

Costwise, the starter tier for a single node starts at $190 per month, with a cluster starting at $1,300 per month.

VictoriaMetrics has long banged the drum against vendor lock-in, and Yatskevich noted the platform was still compatible with Prometheus, a popular open source monitoring platform. OpenTelemetry integration is supported, as is Grafana Cloud, and even shifting everything back to an on-premises or self-hosted environment.

Navoiev said: "We had a real case when a customer decided to migrate from VictoriaMetrics Cloud to an on-prem installation, and we provided the whole amount of data in the format which is suitable for importing data into their on-prem installation."

VictoriaMetrics Cloud is following the tried and tested path of adding a hosted option for customers lacking the resources or desire to get their hands dirty managing an on-premises observability platform.

As for how much of VictoriaMetrics' business might end up in the cloud, Navoiev was non-committal. He said some market analyses put the best-case scenario for other solutions that have cloud and open source versions as being 50-50, but added:

"Cloud is a complementary tool in our ecosystem. We are not trying to compete with Enterprise versus Hosted Enterprise. Open source version of Victoria Metrics, hosted somewhere, versus the cloud."

Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs, said the company prioritizes interoperability to allow customers to select from a variety of data sources, including VictoriaMetrics.

He told The Reg: "That said, there are core differences between how we approach metrics compared to theirs and other managed solutions. For instance, we do not create proprietary extensions to Prometheus or PromQL, instead opting to work with the upstream community to ensure customers do not get locked in.

"Proprietary solutions like VictoriaMetrics' MetricsQL, however, perpetuate vendor lock-in due to their embrace & extend approach. We address cost concerns in observability with features like Adaptive Metrics, which optimize costs without sacrificing performance, and offer discounts for large-scale data management alongside a generous free tier.

"Our approach integrates metrics with logs, traces, and profiles, with 50 percent of customers using multiple products beyond our metrics database Mimir, including Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope, and a host of other solutions like infrastructure and application observability, ensuring comprehensive full-stack observability." ®