Sustainability at VictoriaMetrics
Systems and Processes to Remain Environmentally Responsible
Partnering Towards Sustainability
VictoriaMetrics is more than just a monitoring and obs ervability solution; it’s a partner in your journey towards sustainability. By focusing on efficiency, as a company and in our products, VictoriaMetrics has become a leader in sustainability among (open source) observability solutions.
This page serves as an overview of our sustainability commitments – as a company, in our products, and to you. To discuss your green goals and how VictoriaMetrics can help you achieve them, contact us at sustainability@victoriametrics.com
We are on a mission to make observability sustainable.
VictoriaMetrics provides solutions that directly translate to lower emissions and reduced infrastructure costs.
Our staff adhere to sustainability best practices, including green coding and discerning use of AI.
These practices result in a net decrease in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and a more efficient development lifecycle.
VictoriaMetrics is actively aligning its operations with leading sustainability frameworks.
For a detailed discussion of our progress, please contact sustainability@victoriametrics.com.
Policy & Internal Controls
Fueled by concerns about climate change, green coding has become a hot topic in software development. Programming techniques that minimize the use of large in-memory data structures, unnecessary loops and API calls, and idling servers can decrease consumption.
Inefficient code increases energy consumption and resource usage. VictoriaMetrics developers peer-review, refactor, and rewrite code to make it simple, maintainable, and efficient.
Inefficient code is often also a symptom of the overuse of external libraries. While libraries offer pre-built functionalities, they frequently have extra features not required for the specific task, increasing code size and complexity, and ultimately wasting resources.
Go, a compiled, statically typed language, attempts to bridge the gap between efficiency and ease of use. VictoriaMetrics engineers consider tradeoffs when implementing services and try to prioritize efficient languages where practical.
Unobserved code cannot be optimized or made more efficient, unless this is done by highly experienced developers. As such, observability tooling is a game-changer in pursuing efficient code, equipping developers with powerful monitoring tools that shed light on how code behaves in real-world situations. This granular level of detail allows VictoriaMetrics engineers to focus their optimization efforts on the areas with the biggest potential payoff.
Operational Sustainability
VictoriaMetrics employs a lean and efficient operating model, which results in minimal GHG emissions. First and foremost, VictoriaMetrics is a remote-first company – eliminating emissions associated with commuting, physical office space, and extensive work travel.
VictoriaMetrics is dedicated to ensuring that sustainability efforts scale with the growth of the business, and as such, is exploring a number of additional best practices, including e-waste recycling programs, green procurement policies, and detailed emissions measurements.
Sustainability Features in VictoriaMetrics Products
Benchmark Results
In a benchmark test, VictoriaMetrics outperformed Prometheus, using 1.7x less memory, 2.5x less disk space, and delivering 16x faster query latency on average. The benchmark can always be verified here: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/prometheus-benchmarkEnergy Savings
VictoriaMetrics’ optimized data structures and efficiently coded algorithms reduce energy costs for data processing and storage by up to 90%, resulting in 10x infrastructure cost savings and up to 4x network cost savings.Hardware Reduction
VictoriaMetrics minimizes the hardware needed for data storage, reducing reliance on physical servers and saving money on equipment upgrades.- “VictoriaMetrics is an essential part of data management for the Gemini project and is the backbone of IHI Terrasun’s data collection and management system. The platform’s ability to handle massive datasets with ease has been invaluable.” – Larry Kane, SVP of Project and Product Engineering at IHI Terrasun. Read more on IHI Terrasun’s journey
Improved Query Performance
VictoriaLogs improves query performance for haystack searches by up to 1,000x.Resource Efficiency
According to benchmarks, VictoriaLogs uses up to 30x less RAM and 15x less disk space than comparable solutions.Cluster Mode
VictoriaLogs in cluster mode spreads load across connected hosts, allowing users to optimize scaling both vertically and horizontally.Seamless Integration
VictoriaLogs accepts logs from popular log collectors and supports ingestion directly via the Syslog protocol, removing the need for proxies and converters.Expert Insight
“VictoriaLogs addresses the major challenges of traditional log management tools. It significantly reduces memory usage and infrastructure costs, making it a game-changer for those frustrated by slow searches in large log volumes. By using bloom filters, VictoriaLogs accelerates haystack search times and quickly pinpoints relevant data, making queries up to 1,000 times faster than competitors. Even the single-node version of VictoriaLogs is capable of replacing a comparable solution’s cluster of up to 30 nodes. It’s a high-performance tool that simplifies log management.” – Aliaksandr Valialkin, Co-founder and CTO at VictoriaMetrics. Learn more about VictoriaLogs
- VictoriaTraces is our latest open-source database and is designed for storing and querying distributed tracing data. It’s made for high performance with low resource usage. It is optimized for huge volumes of spans using minimal infrastructure.
Resource Efficiency
- Efficient storage with 10x compression
- Low Resource Usage: Uses dramatically little CPU, RAM, and disk
Our Recommendations to Reduce Footprint
Ensuring your infrastructure footprint is efficient is one of the best ways to ensure your stack is running sustainably. One of the most significant contributors to unnecessary GHG emissions is unused or underused infrastructure resources, including databases, compute servers, file storage buckets, and Kubernetes nodes. Rightsizing resources ensures your stack spins up – and pays for – only what your application needs. With VictoriaMetrics, you can ingest and analyze time-series metrics from your cloud provider, Kubernetes clusters, and application workloads to identify consistently underutilized resources and take targeted actions.
Use VictoriaMetrics dashboards or alerts based on metrics like CPU, memory, or network usage over time to spot idle resources (e.g., VMs with less than 1% usage for 7+ days). Cross-reference with labels or tags to verify non-production status, then terminate them to eliminate wasted energy and emissions.
Track metrics like `container_memory_usage_bytes` and `node_cpu_seconds_total` to identify resources operating at less than 30% capacity. Adjust instance sizes or provisioned IOPS/disk throughput accordingly – reducing emissions and infrastructure spend simultaneously.
Use VictoriaMetrics to feed custom metrics (e.g., request latency, queue depth, utilization) into Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) or cloud autoscaling rules. This ensures your workloads scale dynamically to demand, preventing waste during low-traffic periods.
Use historical load metrics to shift batch jobs, backups, or CI pipelines to low-demand windows. Overlay time-series data with cloud region sustainability data (e.g., Google’s carbon-free energy scores) to reassign jobs to greener regions when feasible.
Identify workloads with short runtimes, fault tolerance, or retry logic using tags or metrics. VictoriaMetrics can monitor job duration, failure rates, and retry loops, helping you migrate these jobs to low-emission, low-cost spot or preemptible resources.
Combine metadata labels (e.g., `env=test`) with usage metrics (e.g., last activity timestamps or sustained idle CPU). Configure alerts in VictoriaMetrics to notify you after a defined period of inactivity – or integrate with cleanup scripts or Terraform automation for expiry-based deletion.
As a meta-point, the deployment of VictoriaMetrics products themselves has infrastructure footprints that can be observed and optimized. Consider tuning your VictoriaMetrics deployments to minimize resource usage in the same ways you would any other cloud workloads.
Compliance
VictoriaMetrics is in the process of establishing formal compliance with several leading sustainability frameworks. For a detailed discussion of that process and our current progress, please contact sustainability@victoriametrics.com