Grafana Mimir
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 6 time series databases by recommenders
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.
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.
18 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Go-to choice when scale is needed
“if you need more scale, there is mimir and a few other options with similar client semantics”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)” “metrics store of your choice like Prometheus or Mimir”
Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"” “you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar)”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” Handles very large metric volumes
“Mimir cleared a billion series years ago prior to several recent re-architectures that make it faster and more efficient to run.”
Comment from 7 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min” “I currently manage 50m active series and it’s brain dead easy using Mimir”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy stack with many components
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “So it doesn't stay optional unfortunately. It quite a heavy dependency to include”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left” Compatibility and long-term support doubts
“even that died with Mimir v3.0, now that it can't talk to generic Prometheus APIs anymore”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “Given the history I ask myself how long will it work, since ist not the default anymore.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
Other time series databases people recommend
The four most recommended other time series databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VictoriaMetrics | 26 | 2 | 93% | 12 | — | Approved |
| TimescaleDB | 21 | 11 | 66% | 7 | — | — |
| Grafana MimirThis page | 12 | 6 | 67% | 5 | — | Approved |
| kdb+ by KX | 9 | 8 | 53% | 7 | — | — |
| RRDtool | 6 | 1 | 86% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“metrics store of your choice like Prometheus or Mimir”
“Mimir cleared a billion series years ago prior to several recent re-architectures that make it faster and more efficient to run.”
“I currently manage 50m active series and it’s brain dead easy using Mimir”
“if you need more scale, there is mimir and a few other options with similar client semantics”
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)”
“you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar)”
“a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system”
“multiple models thinking independently means blind spots get caught before they become your answer.”
“Really neat! And great website!”
“Essentially the promise of the JVM for computational GPU programming”
“the simplicity and core flow of the synthesis model I built”
“Mimir's architecture makes sense but it's not the only solution that works at scale”
“Mimir Enterprise had features added on top, not features locked away”
“Check out this benchmark with Mimir[1] (it is a few years old though)”
“So it doesn't stay optional unfortunately. It quite a heavy dependency to include”
“Given the history I ask myself how long will it work, since ist not the default anymore.”
“I took a quick look at VictoriaMetrics - no Kafka or Kafka-like component to soak up ingestion floods? DOA.”
“it's probably over-engineered for your use-case”
“even that died with Mimir v3.0, now that it can't talk to generic Prometheus APIs anymore”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.