Slack’s New Metrics Storage Engine Challenges Prometheus

Slack's need for a more efficient metrics storage engine than Prometheus led to the development of MACH, which promises significant performance improvements, including 10 times the write throughput and 3 times the read throughput. Created by a team including Slack and several academic and industry partners, MACH addresses the challenges of handling metric data's unique time and space dimensions through features like tiered storage, a staged ingestion pipeline, and multi-value time series ingestion. Unlike Prometheus, which uses a fixed compression mechanism, MACH allows for selecting compression algorithms tailored to specific data types, enhancing efficiency and preventing data explosion. The architecture of MACH, which supports fast data recovery and efficient parallel ingestion, is designed to scale with the high core counts of modern CPUs, offering substantial boosts in operational efficiency. While the code for MACH is not yet publicly available, a proof of concept is promised for future open-source release, and further details are available in the research paper published in CIDR.

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