VictoriaMetrics is a fantastic alternative to prometheus, especially in a home lab where resources are constrained. It’s several times more efficient with its RAM usage while being pretty much fully PromQL compatible (with a few nice extras, too). One of the nice features of VM are retention filters, allowing to set up different retentions for different metrics (this feature is available only in the enterprise version, though). This allows longer retention for important historical data like the average HDD temperature over the last 5 years vs.

I finally got to cleaning up the metrics in my homelab and researched the means to separate my long-term and short-term data. This way you can scrape all kinds of noisy sources (e.g. kubernetes) while having a separate store for things you want to observe on longer time windows (months and years). The best thing? It’s transparent for grafana and the like, so you can keep all your dashboards intact.