VictoriaMetrics Observability Blog

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The Life of a Metric

Follow a single metric through its whole life inside VictoriaMetrics: born as a counter in your process, exported over the wire, given an identity and an inverted-index entry, written through an LSM tree, compressed into columnar blocks on disk, read back by a rate() query, downsampled as it ages, and finally deleted when retention runs out.

How Go’s Built-in Map Works with Swiss Tables

Go 1.24 replaced the built-in map’s bucket-based runtime with Swiss Tables. This article explains groups, control bytes, H1 and H2, probing, table growth, directories, deletion, load factor, and the experimental split-group layout.

Understanding Go's sync.Map from API to Hash Trie

Go’s sync.Map now uses a hash trie. This article builds the implementation from a normal map, then explains lock-free reads, fine-grained writer locking, collisions, retries, deletion, Clear, Range, and the trade-offs against map plus RWMutex.

How VictoriaLogs Stores Your Logs in a Columnar Layout

A beginner-friendly tour of how VictoriaLogs stores your logs on disk: streams and daily partitions, immutable parts, blocks and columns, and the files inside a part (timestamps, values, bloom filters, column headers, and the two-level index) that let a query read only the bytes it needs.

How Airbnb Built a High-Volume Metrics Pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent

Learn how Airbnb rebuilt its observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent to handle over 100 million samples per second, reduce cost by 10x, and simplify high-scale metrics aggregation.

Observability Lessons From OpenAI

OpenAI applies observability to autonomous AI agents using the VictoriaMetrics Stack and OpenTelemetry. Learn to build your own local setup with metrics, logs, and traces that help LLMs test, benchmark, and iterate autonomously.

VictoriaLogs Basics: What You Need to Know, with Examples & Visuals

Cluster mode in VictoriaLogs is not a separate build. It is the same victoria-logs binary started with different flags, so you can scale out without a migration step. Storage nodes persist data on disk, while gateway nodes can stay stateless by pointing to storage with -storageNode. It also ships with practical safety switches, like read-only protection when -storageDataPath runs low and optional partial results when a storage node is down.

VictoriaLogs Practical Ingestion Guide for Message, Time and Streams

VictoriaLogs uses three core concepts: message, time, and stream fields to structure log data. Too few streams create fat streams that are slow to query, while too many unique stream combinations create high cardinality problems…

Monotonic and Wall Clock Time in the Go time package

Operating systems expose a wall clock that can leap or slew with NTP and a monotonic clock that never runs backward. In Go, only time.Now (might) carries both readings, while values from time.Parse, time.Date, etc., are wall-clock-only—so naïve equality checks or time.Since on those can mislead when the system clock shifts.