Prometheus
Open-source metrics collection, time series database and alerting toolkit, the standard for Kubernetes.
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- Alternatives ranked
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About Prometheus
Prometheus is the open-source monitoring system most Kubernetes and cloud-native setups are built around. It scrapes metrics over HTTP from your services and exporters, stores them in its own time series database with labels, and lets you query them with PromQL for graphs and alert rules; Alertmanager handles routing, grouping and silencing of the resulting alerts. A large ecosystem of exporters covers databases, hardware, message queues and more, and many tools expose Prometheus metrics natively. It is deliberately focused: there is no long-term storage clustering, no logs or traces and only a basic web UI, so most teams pair it with Grafana for dashboards and with Thanos, Mimir or VictoriaMetrics for retention and scale. It is free under the Apache 2.0 licence, governed by the CNCF, and runs as a single binary on Linux, macOS, Windows or Kubernetes.
Best for: Engineers running Kubernetes or microservices who want the de facto standard for metrics.
Pros and cons
What works
- Industry-standard metrics format supported almost everywhere
- PromQL is expressive for alerts and analysis
- Simple single-binary deployment
Why people leave
- No built-in long-term or clustered storage
- Metrics only, so logs and traces need other tools
- Basic UI, so you will want Grafana too
Top Prometheus alternatives
See all 5- 1
VictoriaMetrics66.5Prometheus-compatible but uses less memory and disk, with built-in clustering.
- 2
Grafana62.6Grafana Cloud runs a hosted, scalable Prometheus-compatible backend for you.
- 3
Zabbix59.6Agent-based monitoring with a full web UI, better suited to traditional servers and networks.
- 4
Netdata57.2Zero-configuration per-second metrics and dashboards out of the box.
- 5
Datadog55.3Hosted metrics with no servers to run, at a per-host cost.
Why people left Prometheus
In reviewers' own words, from reviews of the apps they moved to. These are their opinions, not ours.
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Prometheus: common questions
Is Prometheus free?
Yes. Prometheus is free, open-source software that you can host yourself.
Is Prometheus open source?
Yes. The source code is on GitHub at prometheus/prometheus. You can also run it on your own server.
What platforms does Prometheus run on?
Prometheus is available for Self-hosted, Linux, macOS and Windows.
What are the best alternatives to Prometheus?
The highest-ranked Prometheus alternatives right now are VictoriaMetrics, Grafana and Zabbix. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.