Hawkular Metrics
Time series databases
Database software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
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What is Hawkular Metrics
Hawkular Metrics is an open-source time-series metrics storage and query service originally developed within the Hawkular project and used for collecting and querying operational metrics. It targets platform and operations teams that need to ingest high-volume metric data and retrieve it for dashboards, alerting, or troubleshooting. The project is closely associated with the Java ecosystem and historically integrates with components in the Red Hat middleware and container platforms. It is commonly deployed as part of a broader monitoring stack rather than as a general-purpose database.
Purpose-built metrics data model
Hawkular Metrics focuses on time-stamped metric series (gauges, counters, availability) and related metadata, which aligns with common infrastructure monitoring use cases. This specialization simplifies ingestion and retrieval patterns compared with general-purpose databases. It supports querying time ranges and aggregations typical for operational metrics. For teams standardizing on metrics rather than events or documents, the model can reduce schema design work.
Open-source and self-hosted
The software is available as open source, enabling self-hosted deployments and code-level inspection. Organizations can run it in controlled environments without relying on a managed service. This can be useful for regulated environments or air-gapped deployments. It also allows internal customization when the project’s defaults do not match operational needs.
Ecosystem alignment with Java/Red Hat
Hawkular Metrics originates from the Hawkular ecosystem and has historically been used alongside Red Hat–aligned middleware and platform components. For organizations already operating those stacks, this can reduce integration effort compared with adopting a separate metrics database. The project’s design choices reflect operational monitoring requirements in container and middleware environments. This can be advantageous when the surrounding tooling expects Hawkular-style APIs and concepts.
Project maturity and activity risk
Hawkular Metrics is not as widely adopted as several other time-series options in the reference space, which can affect community support and availability of up-to-date operational guidance. If development activity slows, users may face longer lead times for fixes and compatibility updates. This increases long-term maintenance risk for production deployments. Buyers should validate current release cadence and issue tracker activity before standardizing.
Narrower tooling ecosystem
Compared with more commonly used metrics backends, Hawkular Metrics typically has fewer off-the-shelf integrations, managed offerings, and third-party operational tooling. Teams may need to build or maintain connectors for collectors, dashboards, or alerting systems depending on their stack. This can increase implementation time and ongoing integration maintenance. It may also limit choice when standardizing across heterogeneous environments.
Less suited for mixed workloads
The product is designed for metrics time series and is not intended to serve as a general-purpose database for diverse analytical workloads. Organizations needing unified storage for metrics plus logs, traces, or complex ad hoc analytics may require additional systems. This can lead to a more fragmented observability architecture. Capacity planning and retention management may also need careful tuning for high-cardinality metric sets.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Open-source / Self-hosted | $0 (Apache License 2.0) | Hawkular Metrics is distributed under the Apache License v2.0; downloadable from the project site/GitHub; self-hosted, community-maintained TSDB based on Cassandra. No commercial subscription tiers listed on the official site. |
Seller details
Hawkular (open-source project; originally led by Red Hat, Inc.)
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA (Red Hat)
Open Source
http://www.hawkular.org/
