054 | VictoriaMetrics + Grafana: Efficient Time-Series Storage for Scalable Monitoring

July 16, 2025

In our series on monitoring systems, we’ve reviewed Munin, Prometheus with Grafana, and Zabbix. Now it’s time to talk about a solution that addresses one of the main pain points of Prometheus users — long-term, scalable, and efficient time-series storage. Meet VictoriaMetrics, a high-performance and cost-effective TSDB (time-series database) that perfectly complements the Prometheus ecosystem when paired with Grafana for visualization.

What Is VictoriaMetrics and Why Do You Need It?

Prometheus handles real-time monitoring and storage well, but its built-in TSDB isn’t designed for long-term retention or scaling to terabytes or petabytes of data. That’s where VictoriaMetrics comes in.

053 | Zabbix Agent + Zabbix Server: All-in-One Monitoring Solution for Scalable Infrastructures

July 15, 2025

We’ve already looked at Munin for basic insights and Prometheus + Grafana for cloud environments. Now let’s turn to Zabbix — a powerful, versatile, and scalable monitoring system that offers a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution for medium and large infrastructures. Zabbix is often chosen by organizations needing centralized monitoring, flexible alerting, and a wide range of data collection methods.

What Is Zabbix and How Does It Work?

Zabbix is a mature open-source monitoring system designed to track the state and performance of various IT components: servers, virtual machines, network devices, databases, web services, and applications.

038 | Databases in Detail: MongoDB — A Flexible Document-Oriented Database

June 30, 2025

We’re wrapping up our database series with MongoDB — one of the most popular document-oriented NoSQL databases. Unlike relational systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL, MongoDB offers high flexibility, scalability, and performance for working with semi-structured and unstructured data.

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is a free and open-source (SSPL/Apache 2.0) document-oriented NoSQL database that stores data in a JSON-like format called BSON (Binary JSON). Unlike relational databases that use fixed schemas, MongoDB stores “documents” (analogous to records) with a dynamic schema. This means documents in the same “collection” (similar to a table) can have different sets of fields — giving developers incredible flexibility.