// the find
timescale/promscale
[DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.
Promscale was a Prometheus remote storage and Jaeger trace backend built on top of PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB. The pitch was one familiar database instead of Elasticsearch or Cassandra, with SQL available for ad-hoc trace analysis. It is officially discontinued as of late 2023.
- SQL-queryable traces is a genuinely underrated idea — being able to JOIN span data with business tables in Postgres is more useful than most Jaeger UIs allow, and the query examples in the docs show this off well
- Two-component architecture (connector + database) is much leaner than the Elasticsearch or Cassandra alternatives that Jaeger users typically had to operate
- prom-migrator, the included Prometheus-to-Prometheus data migration tool, is a standalone utility that may still be useful even though the main project is dead
- 100% PromQL compliance was independently verified by promlabs, not just claimed in the README
- Deprecated and unmaintained — Timescale shut this down in favor of their cloud product; the official docs are gone and no security patches are coming, so this is a dead end for any new adoption
- PostgreSQL is not a natural fit for high-cardinality metrics at scale; TimescaleDB helps, but teams pushing millions of series per second were always going to hit walls that purpose-built systems like Thanos or Mimir don't have
- Required installing a separate PostgreSQL extension (promscale_extension) in addition to TimescaleDB, meaning you owned three moving parts before writing a single byte of telemetry data
- The Jaeger storage plugin model it relied on has itself been superseded by OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines, so the integration story would need rethinking even if the project were alive