Question: why not Prometheus?

[peterbourgon]

Honest question, promise :) It seems that Prometheus+AlertManager already tick most or all of your requirement boxes, depending on how you interpret them. Maybe worth a small section in the README?

[dselans]

I think it's a fair question.

I think there's a number of reasons and those should be documented in some sort of a comparison doc. I'll stick this issue in the project plan as a todo.

With that said, some quick observations:

Prometheus is a metrics oriented monitoring system -- ie. collect metrics from hosts via some method, display those metrics and setup alerting strategies around those. 9volt focuses on blackbox testing - no need for agents/metrics collectors/etc.

In addition, a full prometheus deployment consists of a number of pieces, there's node exporter, prometheus server (and deps?), alertmanager (and maybe more?). One of the core goals of 9volt was to provide a simple, single binary approach for offering all of the necessary pieces for establishing a distributed (remote) monitoring platform, including a UI and so forth.

With that said, I think there is room for both. Having knowledge of what's happening inside the host and knowing what the host looks like from the outside are both necessary pieces.

I'll spend some time soon on writing something up on this subject though, as it's likely to come up again.