InfluxDB+Grafana vs Prometheus pros and cons

Third party integrations
1

Hey folks,

I’m looking for a graphing solution that is a bit more flexible than the HA built in.
(e.g. will not necessarily group all sensors with same units… I have a lot of % sensors and that visualisation is a mess)

Supported options that I am looking at are InfluxDB with Grafana and Prometheus.

I am trying to establish the pro/cons of these two for home assistant.
I have see various good comparisons - e.g. here: https://www.loomsystems.com/blog/single-post/2017/06/07/prometheus-vs-grafana-vs-graphite-a-feature-comparison

Here are my thoughts.

InfluxDB with Grafana

  • +Seems to be more popular based on posts I have seen on the forum. Could be influenced by my initial pref for this option…
  • +Supported by hass.io addons from the community
  • -Requires two third party applications - DB and visualization - more to install, configure and to go wrong :slight_smile:
  • ?Data pushed to influxDB
  • +Possibly better/more flexible visualisations

Prometheus

  • +Requires one 3rd application - less to go wrong
  • ?Seems to be more focused on system parameter visualisation
  • ?Data is pulled from HA

Right now I don’t see a clear winner, and would value the community’s input…

  • InfluxDB & Grafana
  • Prometheus

0 voters

if you vote please drop a note to expand why…

1 Like
2

I will check out Prometheus, this weekend I managed to get InfluxDB/Grafana running on a VirtualBox Ubuntu VM sitting on my windows box. It was fairly easy. Last night I ran the script to import all my historical data from SQL.

One thing I don’t think Prometheus has is the ability to create a sensor from the metric data. I have a average temp over 7 days that I crated from the influx sensor component. I don’t think I can do that in Prometheus.

I might crank up another VM and try Prometheus this week.

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3

I have had influxdb running on my Pi since December, and it has proven reliable.

I checked out Prometheus and the problem with it for my use case was the fact that it fetches data from HA.which means it misses some short term events. Since I use influxdb to record things like when lights are turned on (relative to when motion is detected), I decided it wan’t for me.

I use grafana, but it is installed on my PCs, rather than the Pi, to avoid the Pi (a B+) having to do all the graphics work.

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4

Good point regarding the cpu power required to run grafana. For me it’s not a big consideration as I’m running everything on a VMware box with lots of capacity.

5

Given that you’re running this on a VMWare box, I don’t see how much can go wrong. There’s little needed to configure for Influx or Grafana (they do work right from the box). In Grafana (the UI) all you have to do is add a datasource to InfluxDB and that’s it. In short - I don’t find this being something to consider a con :slight_smile:

I have to admit I have not tried Prometheus at all. One thing I noticed is that Grafana does average some readings, depending on the time you have selected, so you might not actually be getting the minimum and maximum values recorded.

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6

Thanks for the input.

7

I went for influxDB and grafana.
It seems to be by far the most commonly used option, and hence there is a lot of info about install and config…
Also its supported by the community addons for hass.io

8

Just quick update that it was very easy to get this working on HASS.IO.

InfluxDB and Grafana hass.io add-ons here:
Repository: Bestlibre Addons repository

Need to create DB with following command line:
curl -i -XPOST http://hassio.local:8086/query --data-urlencode "q=CREATE DATABASE home_assistant"

Good guide for grafana config:
https://snillevilla.se/snygg-statistik-i-home-assistant-med-grafana-och-influxdb/ (google translate for non-swedes)

1 Like
9

Interesting thread. Not only does it appear that Prometheus has gathered mindshare, but also that Prometheus users are too lazy to post why :wink:

2 Likes
10

Why not use VictoriaMetrics ?