2 posts tagged with "observability"

Last updated: 2026-05-05 · Pharlux v1.0.0 · By Ian Holt

If your Datadog bill is creeping past the comfort line — or if your Loki + Mimir + Tempo + Grafana + Alertmanager stack has become a part-time job you didn't sign up for — there is a third option.

This is the practical setup guide for running Pharlux on a single sub-$25/month VPS: one binary, one config file, one systemd unit, no Docker, no external databases beyond embedded SQLite. By the end you will have an OpenTelemetry-native ingestion endpoint (OTLP gRPC and HTTP/protobuf), durable storage, and SQL across metrics and logs through Apache DataFusion. Setup is about thirty minutes.

Last updated: 2026-05-05 · Pharlux v1.0.0 · By Ian Holt

The thing most observability platforms don't talk about: you cannot query data you have not persisted, and persisting hurts throughput. ClickHouse-style batch writers compress beautifully and scan fast, but typical batch intervals introduce tens of seconds of staleness before new data is queryable. In-memory buffers are immediate but lose data on crash. The two requirements — durability and freshness — pull in opposite directions, and most platforms pick one and document around the other.

Pharlux ships a different design. A custom Apache DataFusion TableProvider unions an in-memory WAL buffer with on-disk Apache Parquet files into one consistent view at query time. Freshly-ingested data is queryable as soon as it lands in the WAL — no flush wait, no buffer-window staleness — and it is queryable through the same SQL surface as historical data on disk.