Google has an alternative that they gave a talk on back in December. Sadly there aren't any papers on it yet. It's called Monarch and it's what backs up Stackdriver.

It's config language is less crazy (Python based) and operates globally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvJdK1xsl4

Edit: Monarch config isn't sane, it's just different and at least not in the crazy languages that borgmon uses.

I will point out that borgmon's language (minus macros) is almost a 1:1 match with Prometheus. You can judge for yourself how crazy that is, but I feel that it's close to as simple as you can get for the power it gives you.

As for Monarch, it's a very different beast. For one, it stores all its rules in a protocol buffer format, so it's more structured. But then you have to write Python code that generates the protocol buffers and pushes them to storage. It looks similar but not the same as the ad-hoc query language. I wouldn't go as far as calling it sane.

It is also a service and it's optimized for Google's network architecture with datacenter local and global nodes and the language itself is aware of this distinction and some computations are done locally, others globally and so on.

For your local monitoring needs (or even global ones, if you're willing to put in the effort), Prometheus is a solid choice.

I'd agree with you after thinking about it some. I haven't really written either, mainly either copy/paste or using tools to assist in creation. So I can't really judge either monitoring language on their ease of use.

"sane" is an interesting choice of words to describe Monarch configuration...

Borgmon's language is weird and crusty. People can debate whether this is the main problem with Borgmon or whether more fundamental changes are necessary.

I won't weight in on that debate. But you can think of Prometheus as an experiment to decide the issue: it is very similar to Borgmon, but has a cleaner language.