Plutono is an interactive visualization web application that provides graphs, charts and also alerts. It is based on a Grafana 7.5 fork, maintained by credativ GmbH, under the Apache 2.0 license which is limited to maintenance and security updates.

In 2021, Grafana switched the licensing of its core products from the Apache License 2.0 to the more restrictive AGPL v3 (Affero General Public License) as an attempt to balance the values of open source with its monetization strategy.

As this license switch might impact several users the Plutono project got initiated and comes with several other tools like Vali (as an alternative to Loki) and Valitail.

Plutono

Plutono brings further possibilities to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Explore, create and exchange dashboards with your team:

• Visualize: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs.
• Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard.
• Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries and data sources side by side.
• Explore Logs: Experience the magic of switching from metrics to logs with preserved label filters. Quickly search through all your logs or streaming them live.
• Alerting: Visually define alert rules for your most important metrics. Plutono will continuously evaluate and send notifications to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, OpsGenie.
• Mixed Data Sources: Mix different data sources in the same graph! You can specify a data source on a per-query basis. This works for even custom datasources.

Vali / Valitail

Vali is a horizontally-scalable, high available and multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate.

Compared to other solutions:

• It does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Vali is simpler to operate and cheaper to run.
• Indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already using with Prometheus, enabling you to seamlessly switch between metrics and logs using the same labels that you’re already using with Prometheus.
• Great solution for storing Kubernetes Pod logs. Metadata such as Pod labels are automatically scraped and indexed.
• Native support in Plutono (needs Plutono v6.0).

Quick Start

You can just start by using the public available container images with your favorite CRE:

$ docker pull ghcr.io/credativ/plutono:main
$ docker pull ghcr.io/credativ/vali:main
$ docker pull ghcr.io/credativ/valitail:main

You may find more information on GitHub and contribute to it. Check it out:

• Plutono: https://github.com/credativ/plutono
• Vali: https://github.com/credativ/vali