Quick look at the issue looks like it wanted to avoid using local storage by Prometheus, but that’s Prometheus specific problem, not remote-read problem.
> ... so external systems (eg Prometheus) can read data from them easily.
I pointed to an issue, which prevents from practical usage of remote read protocol from Prometheus itself.
As for the interoperability with external systems, Prometheus querying API [1] is better suited for this task than Prometheus remote read protocol because of the following reasons:
- Prometheus querying API is easy to use, since it is just JSON over HTTP (unlike compressed protobuf used for Prometheus remote read). E.g. humans can test and debug it either directly in web-browser or in a command-line shell with curl.
- Prometheus querying API is already supported by popular external systems such as Grafana.
- Many Prometheus-compatible systems such as Thanos, Cortex, M3, VictoriaMetrics, etc. support Prometheus querying API out of the box.
I hope the money won't be used to hire a bunch of graphic designers who want's to totally changes how everything looks. I really love the sexy color schemes and user interface as it is. If they want to do changes, I really hope the only do incremental changes to what's already there.
Director of UX here. We're trying to focus on improving existing workflows and less on visual design changes. That being said, form styles will be overhauled soon.
It often seems like UX teams can’t help themselves and that the urge to destroy useful in favor of some idealized UI that doesn’t solve the task at hand comes with them. The UX industry is terrified of expert users or having to understand the product.
It’s literally my job to keep Grafana real. Our budding UX team is getting a lot of training on SRE as a discipline and we run weekly internal UX feedback sessions where all of engineering can join and course-correct. Same with weekly feedback sessions with our existing user base. Get in touch with david at grafana if you’d like to participate.
It's a somewhat insulting stereotype to think of designers as merely being interested in "sexy color schemes".
There are many people in the design/UI/UX space specialising on (often numeric) information design. They tend to be as fluent as any programmer in statistics, if not more.
To this day, programmers tend to conspiratorially suggest to designers to read Edward Tufte, even though his are the first books they make you read in any information design class, and have been since the early 80s.
