Scaling Observability at Spotify with 10x Faster Dashboards & Queries
- Streaming services
- Stockholm, Sweden
Spotify chose VictoriaMetrics to replace its legacy in-house time series database. VictoriaMetrics proved to be a robust, efficient, and flexible platform aligned with Spotify’s operational and architectural requirements.
Main Benefits of Using VictoriaMetrics
Stability & Reliability
High Operational Visibility
Scalable & Performant Alerting
Predictable & Transparent Pricing
Data Ingestion & Query Performance
Downsampling: Extra Cost Efficiency
Challenge
As Spotify scaled its observability, their in-house TSDB proved outdated for handling the large-scale metric ingestion and querying they needed. The team faced severe technical hurdles:
- Closed source: Restricted community support and maintainability, limited compatibility with Prometheus and open standards.
- Unhappy users: Slow queries and frequent timeouts led to frustration amongst the end users.
- High maintenance: Ongoing IT maintenance, support activities and limited features meant it was more expensive to maintain than replace.
Solution
Spotify chose VictoriaMetrics to replace its legacy in-house time series database. VictoriaMetrics proved to be a robust, efficient, and flexible platform aligned with Spotify’s operational and architectural requirements.
- Significant improvements in data ingestion and query performance
- Prometheus-compatible APIs and query language
- Simplified architecture for easier deployment and management
- Enhanced data retention and cost efficiency through downsampling and control features
- Support for both cloud and self-hosted deployments, offering high operational visibility
- Scalable, performant alerting infrastructure
- A predictable and transparent licensing model
- Noticeable improvements in dashboard responsiveness and alert evaluation times
Why VictoriaMetrics Was Chosen Over Other Solutions
VictoriaMetrics handled 78 million datapoints/second, surpassing their target ingestion of 50 million.
The team recognized the simple architecture that VictoriaMetrics offers, plus enterprise features: downsampling & retention control.
VictoriaMetrics stood out for its ability to handle high workloads while maintaining cost-effective resource usage.
Spotify needed scalable and consistent alerting. Adopting VictoriaMetrics’ vmalert and pairing it with internal tooling allowed Spotify’s Observability team to evaluate alerts much faster and more reliably across thousands of services.
Technical Stats
Ingestion Rate
~78M datapoints/second
10x faster dashboards & queries
Faster & reliable alerting
Better data accuracy (no pre-aggregations)
Access to vast OSS ecosystem (Prometheus, OTel)
Significant annual cost savings
Flexible deployment models
What Spotify Had to Say
“Spotify’s transition to VictoriaMetrics has resulted in significant performance improvements across its monitoring stack, greater efficiency in engineering operations, and enhanced scalability to support future growth.”