Storing Continuous Benchmarking Data in Prometheus - Matvey Arye, TimescaleDB/Promscale
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 19/05/2022

Storing Continuous Benchmarking Data in Prometheus - Matvey Arye, TimescaleDB/Promscale

Prometheus is most commonly used for observing live production systems. In this talk, we’ll cover another great use case: benchmarking. Usually, distributed systems are benchmarked by using a benchmark driver to apply load and measure performance. This is typically the only data recorded for the benchmark. The problem with this approach is that it gives you visibility into performance output but no ability to diagnose why performance issues occurred. By using Prometheus in your performance benchmarks you can measure resource usage metrics and internal application metrics across all your components giving you the insights you need to understand the reason for performance issues so you can fix them. This will not require a lot of additional effort because you can reuse the observability infrastructure that you should already be implementing in your application as well as the dashboards already built into Grafana. It also allows retrospective analysis of benchmark runs since the data is stored in Prometheus. In this talk we’ll explain how we set up such an environment as well as share lessons learned about tracking benchmarking runs and keeping the result data organized.