VictoriaMetrics – Time Series Database That’s Built to Keep Up

What is VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics is a high-performance time series database built for modern telemetry workloads. If Prometheus starts to choke under load or your long-term retention plan becomes a storage nightmare — VictoriaMetrics is what usually comes next.

It’s fast, lightweight, and designed to ingest millions of metrics per second without falling apart. It stores time series data in an append-only, compressed format that’s optimized for both disk space and query speed.

Whether you’re running a single-node install or scaling out in a distributed cluster, VictoriaMetrics delivers consistent performance without needing a PhD in tuning.

Key Features

Deployment Notes

For small setups, a single binary is enough:

./victoria-metrics-prod -retentionPeriod=12

For larger environments, switch to cluster mode with:

– vminsert – handles incoming write requests
– vmstorage – stores the actual time series data
– vmselect – serves query responses

Cluster components can be deployed manually or via Kubernetes with Helm charts. TLS, authentication, and long-term storage options are available out of the box.

When It Makes Sense

– Replacing Prometheus TSDB in environments with high ingestion rate
– Centralizing telemetry from multiple Prometheus instances
– Long-term storage of metrics (months or years) without performance loss
– Using MetricsQL for faster queries on large datasets
– Scaling horizontally without switching to a new monitoring stack