How Meshtastic Metrics Exporter Turned Eight Prometheus Queries Into One with Tiger Data
See how Meshtastic Metrics Exporter moved from Prometheus to TimescaleDB, combining node metadata and time-series telemetry in one Postgres database.
The Meshtastic Metrics Exporter, an open source monitoring tool for the Meshtastic mesh radio community, has shifted from Prometheus to a single Postgres database running TimescaleDB. This change was necessary as the network grew to 10,000 nodes, resulting in half a million metric series that overwhelmed Prometheus. Gleb Tcivie, a software engineer and Meshtastic community member, built and maintains the project.
The exporter decodes mesh network traffic into TimescaleDB and provides pre-provisioned Grafana dashboards. The project began within the Meshtastic community and has since expanded to other global networks. The challenge was cardinality, as each distinct combination of labels created a new series in Prometheus. TimescaleDB, an extension on top of Postgres, solved this issue by allowing Gleb to write ordinary SQL and join node details directly against their time-series history.
Three containers start the exporter with one command, making it easy for mesh operators to deploy, without needing to be database administrators.
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