A year in Mimir: Massive scale, new metrics formats, and more

Grafana Mimir, an open-source time series database (TSDB) introduced by Grafana Labs, has made significant strides in scalability and performance since its launch. Designed to handle over 1 billion active series, Mimir offers features such as easy deployment, multi-tenancy, durable storage, and high availability, while maintaining fast query performance. The platform supports various metrics formats, including Prometheus, Datadog, InfluxDB, and Graphite, without requiring code changes, thanks to its open-sourced write proxies. Mimir's architecture allows for efficient data ingestion and query execution, utilizing sharding techniques to enhance performance. Recent updates include support for out-of-order sample ingestion, broadening its applicability beyond traditional Prometheus limitations. The project, gaining popularity on GitHub, is continuously evolving with plans for expanded capabilities like native histograms and simpler deployment modes. Major companies, such as Adobe and Pipedrive, have adopted Mimir to overcome scalability issues, highlighting its effectiveness in large-scale observability solutions.