VictoriaMetrics
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 6 time series databases
People recommend it as a low-maintenance, drop-in Prometheus replacement that is cheap on storage and easy to run. Critics mention an operational burden and no full dashboard UI like Grafana.
People recommend it as a low-maintenance, drop-in Prometheus replacement that is cheap on storage and easy to run. Critics mention an operational burden and no full dashboard UI like Grafana.
28 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 26
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 93%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 26 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 13 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 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
Easy to run and reliable
“It's one of those things that just work. It's extremely easy to run at in a single-instance mode and handles much more than you would expect.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “It has proven itself time and time again at scale, and requires a very low support investment.”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Airbnb discloses a billion-series Prometheus metrics pipeline” “People quickly notice how reliable and low fuss it is, and from there adoption grows.”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “How VictoriaLogs Stores Your Logs in a Columnar Layout” - Comment from 2 Jul 2026 in “How VictoriaLogs Stores Your Logs in a Columnar Layout”
- Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
Low resource and storage costs
“Resource usage for ingestion/storage is much lower than other solutions, and you get more for your money.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “Consider migrating to VictoriaMetrics and saving on storage costs and operations costs.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “MinIO is now in maintenance-mode” “VictoriaMetrics is optimized for such a storage, so it saves the flash drive life.”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “NanoTDB – Golang Append-Only Time Series DB” - Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)”
- Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Airbnb discloses a billion-series Prometheus metrics pipeline”
- Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”
Handles large scale well
“It has proven itself time and time again at scale, and requires a very low support investment.”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Airbnb discloses a billion-series Prometheus metrics pipeline” “appeared to work great for the infrastructure team of an open source online video game”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “They're using VictoriaMetrics on approx scale of 5 Billion active time series”
Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” - Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
- Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “MinIO repository is no longer maintained”
Drop-in Prometheus replacement
“VictoriaMetrics is used as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus, Thanos and Mimir. It works perfectly across all the existing dashboards”
Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics for metrics”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VictoriaMetricsThis page | 26 | 2 | 93% | 12 | — | Approved |
| TimescaleDB | 21 | 11 | 66% | 7 | — | — |
| Grafana Mimir | 12 | 6 | 67% | 5 | — | Approved |
| kdb+ by KX | 9 | 8 | 53% | 7 | — | — |
| RRDtool | 6 | 1 | 86% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 49 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“high-performance, cost-efficient solutions for metrics, logs, and traces”
“a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get”
“People quickly notice how reliable and low fuss it is, and from there adoption grows.”
“They're still using it and are happy though.”
“it was so incredibly easy to operate and troubleshoot, and the performance is unreal”
“stood up VictoriaMetrics to replace Datadog for 33M metrics ($30k/mo savings)”
“VM process takes 70 to 100Mb memory on my system. Not bad, but not great.”
“would keep my OLAP stuff (metrics, logs, traces) in a separate store like VictoriaMetrics, both for capacity and read activity”
“VictoriaMetrics is optimized for such a storage, so it saves the flash drive life.”
“VictoriaMetrics met me where I was and made it trivial to experiment”
“your product looks incredible”
“VictoriaMetrics is optimized solely for typical observability tasks.”
“appeared to work great for the infrastructure team of an open source online video game”
“My own Grafana/VictioriaMetrics setup answers my questions”
“Your writing and talks about timeseries databases were a great inspriratino for us.”
“we took a bunch of inspiration from your work at VM”
“they've built a pretty awesome product but still are a pretty significant operational burden”
“VictoriaMetrics is indeed a very compelling offering.”
“There is another approach for solving this issue - to use increase_pure() function from MetricsQL”
“could save them a lot of costs on infrastructure and operations”
“Never faced issues with either.”
“the single most impactful difference between VM and Prom is simply the difference in startup time”
“It has proven itself time and time again at scale, and requires a very low support investment.”
“Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics for metrics”
“Better, cheaper, faster queries, more k8s native, etc.”
“They scale to petabytes of data on regular block storage”
“We've had success keeping things simple with VictoriaMetrics stack”
“The answer to the question "could I get Prometheus, but with ClickHouse architecture?"”
“Consider migrating to VictoriaMetrics and saving on storage costs and operations costs.”
“I like your product, it's standard etiquette in the community to disclose these affiliations”
“try making boring monitoring solution which just works out of the box”
“They're using VictoriaMetrics on approx scale of 5 Billion active time series”
“All 3 solutions support alerting, managed by same team, are Apache2 licensed”
“They put user experience and stability as the top priority”
“VictoriaMetrics is used as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus, Thanos and Mimir. It works perfectly across all the existing dashboards”
“But it doesn't have a complete dashboard UI like Grafana.”
“Victoriametrics and never change.”
“Resource usage for ingestion/storage is much lower than other solutions, and you get more for your money.”
“It's one of those things that just work. It's extremely easy to run at in a single-instance mode and handles much more than you would expect.”
“I operate a fairly large custom VictoriaMetrics-based Observability platform”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.