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Author: UlricQin

content/en/docs/prologue/prometheus.md

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+---
+title: "Nightingale vs Prometheus"
+description: "Nightingale and Prometheus are often discussed in relation to each other, and in fact, they have a complementary relationship. This article will detail the differences and connections between the two."
+date: 2025-07-26T13:12:27.760+08:00
+lastmod: 2025-07-26T13:12:27.760+08:00
+draft: false
+images: []
+menu:
+  docs:
+    parent: "prologue"
+weight: 150
+toc: true
+---
+
+Nightingale is similar to Grafana in that it can integrate with a variety of data sources, the most common of which is Prometheus-type. Other data sources that are compatible with the Prometheus interface, such as VictoriaMetrics, Thanos, and M3DB, can also be considered Prometheus-type sources, so the relationship between the two is close.
+
+If you have the following requirements, you might consider using Nightingale:
+
+- You have multiple time-series databases, such as Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics, and want to use a unified platform to manage various alert rules with permission control.
+- You are concerned about the single point of failure of Prometheus's alerting engine and want to avoid downtime.
+- In addition to Prometheus alerts, you need alerts from other data sources such as ElasticSearch, Loki, and ClickHouse.
+- You require more flexible alert rule configurations, such as controlling the effective time, event relabeling, event linkage with CMDB, and supporting alert self-healing scripts.
+
+Nightingale also has visualization capabilities similar to Grafana, but it may not be as advanced. In my observation, many companies adopt a combination approach (in the adult world, there are no absolutes):
+
+- Data Collection: A combination of various agents and exporters is used, with Categraf being the primary choice (especially for machine monitoring, seamlessly integrated with Nightingale), supplemented by various exporters.
+- Storage: The time-series database primarily used is VictoriaMetrics, as it is compatible with Prometheus, offers better performance, and has a clustered version. For most companies, the single-node version is sufficient.
+- Alerting Engine: Nightingale is used for alerting, making it easy for different teams to manage and collaborate. It comes with some built-in rules out of the box, and the configuration of alert rules is very flexible, with an event pipeline mechanism that facilitates integration with their own CMDB, etc.
+- Visualization: Grafana is used for visualization, as it offers more advanced and visually appealing charts. The community is also very large, and many pre-made dashboards can be found on the Grafana site, making it relatively hassle-free.
+- On-call Distribution of Alert Events: [FlashDuty](https://flashcat.cloud/product/flashduty/) is used, which supports integration with various monitoring systems such as Zabbix, Prometheus, Nightingale, cloud monitoring solutions, Elastalert, etc. It consolidates alert events into a single platform for unified noise reduction, scheduling, claim escalation, response, distribution, and more.