Compare Blueflood vs. Heroic

Blueflood is an advanced distributed metric processing system designed for high throughput and low latency, operating as a multi-tenant solution that supports Rackspace Metrics. It is actively utilized by both the Rackspace Monitoring team and the Rackspace public cloud team to effectively manage and store metrics produced by their infrastructure. Beyond its application within Rackspace, Blueflood also sees extensive use in large-scale deployments documented in community resources. The data collected through Blueflood is versatile, allowing users to create dashboards, generate reports, visualize data through graphs, or engage in any activities that involve analyzing time-series data. With a primary emphasis on near-real-time processing, data can be queried just milliseconds after it is ingested, ensuring timely access to information. Users send their metrics to the ingestion service and retrieve them from the Query service, while the system efficiently handles background rollups through offline batch processing, thus facilitating quick responses for queries covering extended time frames. This architecture not only enhances performance but also ensures that users can rely on rapid access to their critical metrics for effective decision-making.

Heroic is an open-source monitoring solution initially developed at Spotify to tackle challenges related to the large-scale collection and near real-time analysis of metrics. It comprises a limited number of specialized components that each serve distinct purposes. The system offers indefinite data retention, contingent upon adequate hardware investment, alongside federation capabilities that enable multiple Heroic clusters to connect and present a unified interface. A key component, Consumers, is tasked with the consumption of metrics, illustrating the system's design for efficiency. During the development of Heroic, it became evident that managing hundreds of millions of time series without sufficient context poses significant challenges. Additionally, the federation support facilitates the handling of requests across various independent Heroic clusters, allowing them to serve clients via a single global interface. This feature not only streamlines operations but also minimizes geographical traffic, as it allows individual clusters to function independently within their designated zones. Such capabilities ensure that Heroic remains a robust choice for organizations needing effective monitoring solutions.