> VictoriaMetrics is a layer on top of Prometheus from a quick read.
Sorry, but you're wrong!
VictoriaMetrics was built from scratch with own ideas [1][2][3] and never was build on top of Prometheus. Yes, it use some libs which are used in Prometheus/InfluxDB/othe open source projects but thats all. More over VictoriaMetrics team has created own query language, named MetricsQL [4] which is inspired by PromQL [5].
> I managed simple alerts just using Prometheus's alert manager and aws's simple mail system, I prefer this simpler approach.
In the VictoriaMetrics stack, alerting is placed in a separate utility - vmalert [6] that is responsible for alerts and works with alertmanager as well as Prometheus.
