Chronosphere FAQs

Chronosphere Observability Platform has a unique pricing model that is different from others out there. Instead of pricing based on host or VM, Chronosphere only charges for the useful data that you choose to retain in the Chronosphere Observability Platform. With our Control Plane, you can analyze and shape your observability data to fulfill your existing dashboard and alerting needs without having to store all the data in the raw form. Unlike other observability solutions that require you to store, query, and pay for all data, whether or not it is useful, Chronosphere pre-computes the data to get rid of the waste and efficiently delivers it to the glass.

Every organization’s needs are very different, so we want to work with you to drive the right value at the right price, without the fear of overages or huge price hikes when your data complexity inevitably grows. 

For the Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline, we follow a straightforward pricing model, based solely on data throughput – the volume of raw data you transmit through the pipeline. We understand that every team’s needs are different, so we work with you to drive the right value at the right price.

We offer a flexible support model to meet your needs. We have dedicated customer success resources and offer 24/7 x 365 communications by Slack, Zendesk, or e-mail, in addition to options for weekly office hours, ad-hoc calls, and shared Slack channels. You are assigned a customer success architect, solution architect, and account executive that you’ll have direct access to.

Are you a customer needing to access our team or get a question answered? Reach out to our support team here, and someone will be with you ASAP!

Due to the highly customized nature of each organization’s observability aggregation and rollup needs, we will work with you to stand up a pilot. The onboarding process depends on the scale of the deployment, but the goal is to prove out the required capabilities.

Pilots are typically free, unless you are running a large scale or long term pilot. The average pilot is 2-3 weeks long, during which you’ll be able to try out Chronosphere with your actual production data, with longer-term evaluations possible (most likely a paid pilot for long durations of evaluation).

We will work with you to tune control plane policies, define different resolution, and retention policies specific to your needs, and you will have full access to the same support you’d get as a Chronosphere customer. Ready to start a pilot? Click here to speak to our experts about your needs.

Chronosphere’s backend is based on M3DB, an extremely scalable time series database and has been proven to support more than 13+ billion active times series.

We also provide users with an industry-leading Control Plane which provides the capability to define aggregation rules to reduce cardinality and not lose data resolution. You can use aggregation rules to remove labels you don’t need and reduce the amount of metrics that are stored.

Yes! Chronosphere supports PromQL.

Chronosphere has been verified by an independent third party to be 100% PromQL compatible. The Chronocollector fully supports Prometheus rules in it’s configuration. You simply copy over your Prometheus config over to the Chronocollector config. In addition, Chronosphere offers Query Builder, which enables you to dynamically build and modify your PromQL queries with visualizations provided at every step along the way.

M3 is an open-source TSDB, while Chronosphere is an end-to-end observability platform for metrics and traces that were inspired by M3.

We support Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps and email. In addition, we provide a general purpose webhook which can be utilized to integrate with almost anything.

The Chronosphere collector is responsible for ingesting metrics and traces from a customer’s various applications and then sending them along to the Chronosphere backend. It is the only Chronosphere software deployed in customer environments. You can set up as many collectors as you need.

For a full explanation of how it works, check out our blog post on how Chronosphere collects metrics.

Chronosphere is a flexible SaaS solution, built for scaling cloud native engineering organizations.

The Chronosphere platform can ingest metrics and distributed trace data in a variety of open source formats, as well as Chronosphere collector instances which are the only pieces of technology that needs to be deployed by customers.The datastore and dashboards are fully provided and managed by Chronosphere.

Customers can manage their configuration through our Terraform provider or a command-line tool, in addition to through the UI.

Yes! Chronosphere has a Terraform provider.

Chronosphere supports both Graphite and PromQL via Query Builder, which enables you to dynamically build and modify your Graphite and PromQL queries with visualizations provided at every step along the way.

In addition to the built-in dashboards you can also use Chronosphere as a datasource for your self-managed Grafana.

We will keep your data for as long as you would require, as resolution/retention rates differ by customer. You can send in historical data.

Chronsphere can horizontally scale to 1.5 billion metrics/second.

We have a 99.9% SLA, calculated on a per-tenant basis.

Availability is determined continuously and automatically by monitoring for tenant downtime by having an external probe write a randomly generated datapoint and read it back, to verify that the platform is successfully persisting data and the whole end to end flow is working.

We calculate the SLA specifically for your tenant, not everyone, with a focus on the ability to read and write data.

Learn more about our Commitment to Availability.

A telemetry pipeline is a data management tool that engineering and security teams use to…

• …aggregate telemetry (metrics, events, logs, and traces) from multiple sources.
• …pre-process that data in flight. For example, to perform data transformation, data enrichment, or log filtering.
• …route that data to one or many destinations. For example, observability platforms, SIEM platforms, and archive storage targets.

Sometimes, these tools are also referred to as an "observability pipeline." Telemetry pipelines can support all MELT data (metrics, events, log and traces). However, they are most commonly used for collecting, pre-processing, and routing log data.

Using a telemetry pipeline can provide several benefits:

• Cost reduction: Pre-processing data upstream can reduce the total volume of data you route downstream. A smaller data footprint reduces both observability/SIEM costs and egress charges.

• Higher data quality: Telemetry pipelines can help you normalize data from disparate sources, enrich data with third-party information, and eliminate noisy fields. All of these actions can streamline troubleshooting and investigation processes. If you have sensitive data requirements, a telemetry pipeline can also be used for data masking and PII redaction.
• Simplified collection and routing: To distribute data across multiple backends, engineers often deploy a combination of proprietary and/or open source log collection agents. This creates a complex observability architecture that is hard to manage. A telemetry pipeline provides a single interface to manage data collection and routing – and often, agent fleet management – removing this complexity.

Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline is unique from other providers in a few ways. 

• Based on FluentD and Fluent Bit: Telemetry Pipeline was created by the founders of FluentD and Fluent Bit – the product stems from these projects. The massive Fluent community is constantly contributing to these projects, and our customers benefit from this speed of innovation. 
• Lower Infrastructure Cost: Since Telemetry Pipeline is written in C, it requires significantly fewer resources than other offerings – it is 20x more resource efficient than other leading pipeline solutions. As a result, you can save on infrastructure costs.

• Kubernetes Native: Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline is built using modern Kubernetes patterns, even when deployed on top of Linux servers. This architecture allows for particular components of the Telemetry Pipeline to scale up as needed without requiring the entire system to increase. Other advantages include auto-healing, high availability, and load balancing.
• Fluent Bit Fleet Management: If you’re running Fluent Bit, you can use Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline to simplify fleet management. It provides centralized control over Fluent Bit enabling you to configure agents, monitor their health, and keep them up to date.

Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline follows a hybrid or bring your own cloud (BYOC) architecture pattern by default. This means the data plane (where data processing occurs) is deployed in your environment, while Chronosphere hosts the management plane (where commands are issued). 

This deployment model allows for rapid deployment of multiple core instances within different environments or clouds. For example, you can have five Telemetry Pipeline core instances deployed across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, your private data center, and even your laptop.

Telemetry Pipeline does not require any inbound network connections and instead only require a single outbound connection the management plane

This architecture gives the following advantages:

• Faster processing and lower latency: When the data plane is deployed closer to the data source, there are less latency and network hops required.
• Increased data privacy: With data collection and processing staying within the environment, there is less risk of data leaking out of the environment outside of its sovereignty or compliance boundary. Chronosphere has no access to the underlying data.
• Cost optimization: When data is processed (mainly reduced or removed) within your environment this can vastly decrease your bandwidth and egress charges within public cloud environments.

Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline supports logs, metrics, events, and traces through OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and other common inputs. However, our processing rules are more mature for log data, allowing you to manipulate data and reduce volume upstream. 

For metrics, events, and traces, Telemetry Pipeline excels in routing, connecting any data source to any destination. 

Whether you're focusing on pre-processing logs or optimizing your overall telemetry data flow, Telemetry Pipeline can help meet your needs.

Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline supports over 70 out-of-the-box integrations, spanning both source and destination plugins. These integrations include, but are not limited to:

• Agents, like the Datadog Agent, Fluent Bit, and Splunk HEC.
• Observability platforms, like Chronosphere, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic, and Splunk.
• SIEM platforms, like CrowdStrike, Devo Cloud, Exabeam, and Graylog.
• Cloud services, like Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, and Azure Event Grid.

We follow a straightforward pricing model, based solely on data throughput – the volume of raw data you transmit through the pipeline. We understand that every team’s needs are different, so we work with you to drive the right value at the right price.