We Migrated from StatsD to Prometheus in One Month

Description and use

Mixpanel migrated from StatsD to Prometheus in one month, improving query performance, alert latency, and scalability.

Problem

Mixpanel’s existing StatsD-based monitoring stack was hitting scalability limits and lacked the observability features needed for modern cloud workloads.

Outcome

The migration completed in one month, improving query performance by 3x, reducing alert latency, and eliminating the high-cardinality bottleneck.

Workflow

• 1. Conducted a metrics inventory and identified high-cardinality metrics.
• 2. Designed a mapping strategy from StatsD to Prometheus exposition format.
• 3. Implemented Prometheus exporters for existing services.
• 4. Deployed Prometheus server and configured federation for scalability.
• 5. Migrated dashboards from StatsD to Prometheus queries.
• 6. Validated data consistency and performance through load testing.
• 7. Decommissioned legacy StatsD collectors and rolled out the new stack to production.

Evidence

We migrated from StatsD to Prometheus in one month

Source

The new stack provides richer query language, better alerting, and easier integration with Kubernetes.

Source