stackdriver-prometheus vs prometheus-to-sd

[geekflyer]

Hi,

I'm a bit confused as to how stackdriver-prometheus relates to prometheus-to-sd and what are the pros / cons of using each? What is the recommended option way of sending prometheus-like metrics to stackdriver?

Both projects are maintained by Google which doesn't make the choice easier :) I hope someone can clarify, perhaps adding a note to the README would be useful for others.

[jkohen]

@geekflyer thanks for bringing that up. My recommendation is to go with stackdriver-prometheus because it's developed and supported for Stackdriver users, but you can help yourself to either tool.

Google develops stackdriver-prometheus primarily for Stackdriver users and gives support to Stackdriver users. We designed the user experience to meet the expectations of Prometheus users and to make it easy to run with Prometheus server (we are working on a Prometheus server sidecar version). stackdriver-prometheus is intended to monitor all your applications, Kubernetes and beyond.

Google develops prometheus-to-sd primarily for Google Kubernetes Engine to collect metrics from system services in order to support Kubernetes users. We designed the tool to be lean when deployed as a sidecar in your pod. It's intended to support only the metrics the Kubernetes team at Google needs; you can use it to monitor your applications, but the user experience could be rough.

/cc @piosz

[geekflyer]

Hi @jkohen thanks for your prompt answer. Unfortunately I'm still not 100% clear what I should use in our scenario. I should have probably clarified this before, but here's a bit more context:

• we run GKE
• we aim to monitor k8s state metrics like "replicas_available" for our own k8s apps that run on gke
• we would run stackdriver-prometheus or prometheus-to-sd both in gke / k8s
• we don't aim to use prometheus directly (i.e. no query), but rather make use of one those packages only to be able to scrape metrics which are only exported in prometheus format (e.g. kube-state-metrics).

[jkohen]

@geekflyer I believe stackdriver-prometheus will meet your needs, and it's what I would recommend. If that's not the case, I'd like to hear more about your needs.