Whenever in DevOps we discuss about monitoring and alerting systems we often come across the TICK Stack! What is a TICK stack? What is so special about it? Is it different from ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, Cloudwatch, and NewRelic? I will try to answer all of these queries briefly but my motivation for writing this blog is the Alert Flooding issue I faced while testing my TICK stack.
Note: This blog is not about the detailed working about TICK and its setup.
What is TICK ? What is special about it?
To explain TICK, it is basically a complete collection of services provided by the InfluxData community to capture, store, stream, process, and visualize data to provide us a highly available and robust solution for monitoring and alerting. TICK is an abbreviation for :
- Telgeraf – It is a very light-weighted server agent for scrapping metrics from the system it runs on, also has the capability to pull the metrics from various third-party APIs like Kafka, StatsD, etc.
- InfluxDB – It is known as the heart of the TICK stack and genuinely speaking it is one of the most efficient and high-performance database stores for handling high volumes of time-series data. It is open source and uses SQL-like query language.