One of the newest products on the Aiven platform is M3. As a distributed time series database it's ideal for storing the ever-growing number of d

A developer's first look at M3

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2021-07-27 21:30:06

One of the newest products on the Aiven platform is M3. As a distributed time series database it's ideal for storing the ever-growing number of data points that we collect in—and about—modern applications. Read developer advocate Lorna Mitchell's first impressions about M3, and how it could be useful for you.

What immediately strikes me about M3 is how it is designed to fit in alongside the other tools in a likely architecture. It has interfaces to match the ones we already know and love from Prometheus and InfluxDB. The integration with Grafana is also seamless.

Prometheus is commonly used for server monitoring. If your platform is already sending data to Prometheus, then changing the data store to M3 will be painless. A server agent such as Telegraf can send data to M3 via its Prometheus write endpoints just as easily as it sends data to Prometheus itself.

There's nothing shiny here, because the intentional reuse of protocols does not make good headlines. It does however make excellent integrations and successful migration projects, and I know which I prefer from the tools I choose!