SHSelfHostIndex

Telegraf vs Thanos

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
TE Telegraf Plugin-driven server agent for collecting metrics VS TH Thanos Highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage
FeatureTelegrafThanos
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseMITApache-2.0
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyEasyHard
Min. RAM64 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 17,736★ 14,167
First released20152018
ReplacesDatadog AgentDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Telegraf if…

  • Huge plugin catalog
  • Trivial to deploy
Telegraf details

Choose Thanos if…

  • Scales Prometheus to massive deployments
  • Cheap long-term storage
Thanos details

Frequently asked questions

Is Telegraf or Thanos better?

Telegraf is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Thanos if its specific feature set fits your needs better.

Are Telegraf and Thanos free and open-source?

Yes. Telegraf is licensed under MIT and Thanos under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Telegraf and Thanos with Docker?

Telegraf: yes. Thanos: yes.

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