Google Cloud Monitoring's time series database is backed by Monarch.

The query language is mql which closely resembles the internal Python based query language: https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/mql

Interesting that Google replaced a pull based metric system similar to Prometheus with a push based system... I thought one of the selling points of Prometheus and the pull based dance was how scalable it was?

too small for me, i was looking more for the scale of the universe.

A huge difference between monarch and other tsdb that isn’t outlined in this overview, is that a storage primitive for schema values is a histogram. Most (maybe all besides Circonus) tsdb try to create histograms at query time using counter primitives.

All of those query time histogram aggregations are making pretty subtle trade offs that make analysis fraught.

I broke this once several years ago. I even use the incident number in my random usernames to see if a Googler recognizes it.

Discussion from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303422

I don’t really grasp why this is a useful spot in the trade off space from a quick skim. Seems risky.

The first time I heard about Monarch was in discussions about the hilarious "I just want to serve 5 terabytes" video[0].

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

A lot of Google projects seem to rely on other Google projects. In this case Monarch relies on spanner.

I guess its nice to publish at least the conceptual design so that others can implement it in “rest of the world” case. Working with OSS can be painful, slow and time consuming so this seems like a reasonable middle ground (although selfishly I do wish all of this was source available).

Stop overhyping software with buzzwords