Prometheus

Open-source metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit

About Prometheus

Prometheus is the standard for cloud-native metrics collection. It uses a pull-based model and its own query language (PromQL) for powerful metric analysis.

Key Features

Pull-based collection
PromQL query language
Time-series storage
Alertmanager
Service discovery
CNCF graduated

Prometheus is the foundation of cloud-native monitoring. Originally built at SoundCloud and now a CNCF graduated project, it defines how modern infrastructure collects and queries metrics. Prometheus scrapes metrics endpoints at regular intervals, stores time-series data efficiently, and provides PromQL — a powerful query language for slicing, aggregating, and alerting on metrics. Paired with Grafana for visualization and Alertmanager for notification routing, Prometheus forms the backbone of the open-source monitoring stack used by the majority of Kubernetes deployments.