Chronosphere Reviews & Product Details

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Excellent customer support and engagement, quickly addressing any friction we encountered.

- Terraform provider, Chronoctl, and overall resource management experience

- Query builder tool is useful when debugging PromQL queries

- Explorer window allows you to overlay results from multiple queries, which is helpful when debugging and creating new PromQL queries.

- Filtering Alerts on what's currently firing Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- The interface is challenging to use on mobile.

- Specific UI components don't act as you initially expect them to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I honestly have experienced no downsides. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to setup and configure and easy migration of existing Prometheus resources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nice to have cloud provider integrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Monitoring Dashboards. Ability to set alerting via code and integrations to pagerduty. Service accounts for different deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Integration with AWS Lambdas.

Needs logging functionality as well to correlate with metrics Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very flexible and w ecan use it very easily Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Promql is hard to use. The query language is very difficult Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Simplicity in on-boarding

2. Integration with Grafana open-source, Prometheus libraries isolating vendor-specific tools

3. Customer services and on-boarding help Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Chronosphere is a great product for Prometheus metrics but had a few issues related to carbon metrics query performance, and time bucketing. But all these were resolved as a part of on-boarding process Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.