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FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the challenges of running your own Prometheus?​

The key challenge faced by an enterprise:

  • Modern Time Series systems don’t have to grow along a single axis of Cardinality, Coverage, or Retention alone. Instead, the rate of ingestion and exploration warrants an expansion on all three axes. There is a constant need to scale TimeSeries Database vertically.
  • Data are abundant, but it’s not being used. Growing costs of storing and querying this data lead to time and effort in auditing what metrics are used, how much data retention is necessary, and trimming from your database.
  • Enterprises must dedicate full-time engineering resources to manage their time series database. Automation to scale with rapid changes in data shape and recovery from downtime must be implemented and maintained. To support needs across the business, teams create multiple database instances to handle concurrency and implement query sharding to improve performance. Orgs will also implement a solution like Thanos or Cortex to enable long-term storage of metric data. These implementations will cost significant engineering time to create and maintain and make things operationally confusing for developers sending and querying metrics.

Is Levitate fully managed?​

You can set up a cluster and get going in under two minutes. How do you ask? Read our How to onboard to Levitate guide for more details.

An enterprise can run Prometheus internally or offload all metrics storage to Levitate. We provide flexibility in our offerings per the requirements most suited for our customers.

Prometheus is open-source software that collects metrics from targets by "scraping" metrics HTTP endpoints and stores the metrics as time-series data.

Is Levitate SOC2 compliant?​

Last9 cares deeply about its customer’s data and is SOC2 Type II certified.

Can Levitate be deployed on infrastructure owned by the enterprise?​

Yes, Levitate can also run on any cloud provider of your choice.

What features are available on SaaS vs. on-prem instances?​

All features, including retention, are available on SaaS and on-prem instances.

How do enterprises ingest data from GCP, Azure & AWS?​

All cloud providers have a Prometheus-compatible exporter. This can be run to scrape metrics from all infrastructure resources and ingested into Levitate.

Does the data go over an open internet?​

Yes, by default, it does, and securely. Alternatively, you could do VPC Peering and remote write data to Levitate over HTTP.

How to retrieve data for internal consumption?​

This can be done with simple querying as one will with Grafana and other visualization tools to query TSDB data. Read our How to configure Grafana for Levitate guide for more details.