







  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at
  • Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Julien Danjou about Gnocchi, an open source time series database built to handle large volumes of system metrics


  • Introductions
  • How did you get introduced to Python?
  • Can you start by describing what Gnocchi is and how the project got started?
    • What was the motivation for moving Gnocchi out of the Openstack organization and into its own top level project?
  • The space of time series databases and metrics as a service platforms are both fairly crowded. What are the unique features of Gnocchi that would lead someone to deploy it in place of other options?
    • What are some of the tools and platforms that are popular today which hadn’t yet gained visibility when you first began working on Gnocchi?
  • How is Gnocchi architected?
    • How has the design changed since you first started working on it?
    • What was the motivation for implementing it in Python and would you make the same choice today?
  • One of the interesting features of Gnocchi is its support of resource history. Can you describe how that operates and the types of use cases that it enables?
    • Does that factor into the multi-tenant architecture?
  • What are some of the drawbacks of pre-aggregating metrics as they are being written into the storage layer (e.g. loss of fidelity)?
    • Is it possible to maintain the raw measures after they are processed into aggregates?
  • One of the challenging aspects of building a scalable metrics platform is support for high-cardinality data. What sort of labelling and tagging of metrics and measures is available in Gnocchi?
  • For someone who wants to implement Gnocchi for their system metrics, what is involved in deploying, maintaining, and upgrading it?
    • What are the available integration points for extending and customizing Gnocchi?
  • Once metrics have been stored, aggregated, and indexed, what are the options for querying and analyzing the collected data?
  • When is Gnocchi the wrong choice?
  • What do you have planned for the future of Gnocchi?

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