Prometheus
Open-source metrics monitoring and time-series database
Prometheus is profiled here as a DevOps tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system started at SoundCloud in 2012 and the second project to graduate from the CNCF after Kubernetes. It scrapes metrics from instrumented targets, stores them in a time-series database, and exposes PromQL for slicing that data and driving alerts. A pull-based model and service discovery make it the default metrics layer for Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure. Alertmanager groups, routes, and silences alerts, while remote-write ships metrics to long-term stores such as Thanos or Mimir for retention beyond local disk. A wide library of exporters exposes metrics from databases, queues, and hardware that lack native instrumentation.
Key Capabilities:
Pull-based metric collection from instrumented endpoints
PromQL query language for time-series analysis
Local time-series database with efficient storage
Alertmanager for alert routing, grouping, and silencing
Service discovery across Kubernetes and cloud platforms
Client libraries and exporters under an Apache 2.0 license
Alternative tools
- OpenTelemetry
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- Grafana
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- Porter
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- Kamal
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- SeaweedFS
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- Ansible
Agentless automation for configuration and provisioning