# Grafana Mimir

12 Hacker News commenters recommended Grafana Mimir and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open-source metrics database that scales to very large series counts, often recommended when Prometheus is not enough. Caveat: it is heavy to run and over-engineered for small setups.

## Why people recommend it

- Go-to choice when scale is needed (3 comments): "if you need more scale, there is mimir and a few other options with similar client semantics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396237)) "metrics store of your choice like Prometheus or Mimir" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50235649)) "you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121185))
- Handles very large metric volumes (2 comments): "Mimir cleared a billion series years ago prior to several recent re-architectures that make it faster and more efficient to run." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994483)) "I currently manage 50m active series and it’s brain dead easy using Mimir" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984631))

## What people warn about

- Heavy stack with many components (3 comments): "I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48130681)) "So it doesn't stay optional unfortunately. It quite a heavy dependency to include" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936811)) "a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091591))
- Compatibility and long-term support doubts (2 comments): "even that died with Mimir v3.0, now that it can't talk to generic Prometheus APIs anymore" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935281)) "Given the history I ask myself how long will it work, since ist not the default anymore." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936406))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [VictoriaMetrics](https://hackerapproved.com/p/victoriametrics.md): 26 recommend
- [TimescaleDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/timescaledb.md): 21 recommend
- [kdb+ by KX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kdb-plus.md): 9 recommend
- [RRDtool](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rrdtool.md): 6 recommend
- [InfluxDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/influxdb.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Grafana Mimir", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mimir/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).