Prometheus vs ElasticSearch. Which is better for container and server monitoring?
ElasticSearch is a document store and more of a search engine, I think ElasticSearch is not good choice for monitoring high dimensional data as it consumes lot of resources. On the other hand prometheus is a TSDB which is designed for capturing high dimensional data.
Anyone experienced in this please let me know what's the best tool to go with for container and server monitoring.
Answer
ELK is a general-purpose no-sql stack that can be used for monitoring. We've successfully deployed one on production and used it for some aspects of our monitoring system. You can ship metrics into it (if you wish) and use it to monitor them, but its not specifically designed to do that. Nor does the non-commercial version (version 7.9) come with an alerting system - you'll need to setup another component for that (like Sensu) or pay for ES commercial license.
Prometheus, on the other hand, is designed to be used for monitoring. And along with its metric-gathering clients (or other 3rd party clients like Telegraf and its service discovery options (like consul) and its alert-manager is just the right tool for this job.
Ultimately, both solutions can work, but in my opinion Elasticsearch will require more work and more upkeep (we found that ES clusters are a pain to maintain - but that depends on the amount of data you'll have).