Deploy and Host

VictoriaMetrics — the fast, cost-effective, Prometheus-compatible time series database. A single Go binary bundles ingestion, storage and querying: point Prometheus remote-write, vmagent or Grafana at it and your dashboards keep working with zero changes. Deploys in one click, zero form fields.

On first boot the binary starts on Railway's injected PORT, creates its data dir on the persistent volume, and begins self-scraping — the built-in vmui at /vmui shows live metrics within seconds.

About Hosting

One service, deployed with one click:

victoriametrics — the VictoriaMetrics single-server binary (pinned official image victoriametrics/victoria-metrics:v1.154.1), healthcheck GET /health, honors Railway's injected PORT
Persistent volume victoriametrics-data at /data — 12-month retention by default (RETENTION_PERIOD tunable)

No companion database: VictoriaMetrics is its own storage engine. Self-scraping (SELF_SCRAPE_INTERVAL=10s) means the instance monitors itself out of the box.

Why Deploy

Self-hosting VictoriaMetrics means your metrics never leave your infrastructure — no per-series pricing, no cardinality bills, no vendor lock-in. It uses up to 7x less RAM than Prometheus for the same workload, ingests via every Prometheus protocol (remote-write, scrape, InfluxDB line protocol, Graphite, OpenTSDB), and queries with PromQL plus the MetricsQL superset. On Railway it is always on, so retention and alerting actually work around the clock.

Common Use Cases

A drop-in Prometheus replacement at half the RAM — same PromQL, same Grafana dashboards
Long-term metrics retention for homelabs, side projects and small fleets (12 months default)
A central remote-write sink for vmagent or Prometheus fleets (/api/v1/write)
Metrics backend for alerting (pair with vmalert) and anomaly-detection pipelines

Configuration

Zero form fields on deploy. After deploy, the optional knobs in the service's Variables panel:

RETENTION_PERIOD — months of metrics to keep (default 12)
SELF_SCRAPE_INTERVAL — self-monitoring scrape interval (default 10s)
PORT — injected by Railway automatically

Ingest: POST https:///api/v1/write (Prometheus remote-write). Query: /api/v1/query or the visual explorer at /vmui.

Dependencies for

Deployment Dependencies

Hobby plan or higher for the persistent volume. VictoriaMetrics needs nothing at runtime beyond its volume — no external API keys, no companion services, no third-party accounts. Open /vmui after deploy to explore the self-scraped metrics.