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14 changes: 8 additions & 6 deletions docs/introduction/comparison.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -56,10 +56,12 @@ RRD-style database that expects samples to arrive at regular intervals. Every
time series is stored in a separate file, and new samples overwrite old ones
after a certain amount of time.

Prometheus also creates one local file per time series, but allows storing
samples at arbitrary intervals as scrapes or rule evaluations occur. Since new
samples are simply appended, old data may be kept arbitrarily long. Prometheus
also works well for many short-lived, frequently changing sets of time series.
[Prometheus's local TSDB](/docs/prometheus/latest/storage/#on-disk-layout) keeps
recent samples in an in-memory head protected by a write-ahead log, then
persists them in time-based block directories containing a chunks directory, an
index, and metadata. It accepts samples at arbitrary intervals as scrapes or
rule evaluations occur. Retention is configurable, and Prometheus also works
well for many short-lived, frequently changing sets of time series.

### Summary

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -107,8 +109,8 @@ Prometheus, by contrast, supports the float64 data type with limited support for
strings, and millisecond resolution timestamps.

InfluxDB uses a variant of a [log-structured merge tree for storage with a write ahead log](https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.7/concepts/storage_engine/),
sharded by time. This is much more suitable to event logging than Prometheus's
append-only file per time series approach.
sharded by time. This is more suitable for event logging, while Prometheus's
block-based local TSDB is optimized for monitoring time series.

[Logs and Metrics and Graphs, Oh My!](https://grafana.com/blog/2016/01/05/logs-and-metrics-and-graphs-oh-my/)
describes the differences between event logging and metrics recording.
Expand Down
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