About Prometheus
Prometheus has become the industry standard for monitoring applications and services — and a must-have for the Grafana community.
The easiest way to get started is with Grafana Cloud, our fully composable observability stack.
Introduction to Prometheus monitoring
Prometheus® is an open source monitoring system developed by engineers at SoundCloud in 2012. Prometheus was the second project accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes, and also the second to graduate.
The Prometheus monitoring system includes a rich, multidimensional data model, a concise and powerful query language called PromQL, an efficient embedded time series database, and over 150 integrations with third-party systems.
Grafana Labs is proud to support the development of the Prometheus project by employing Prometheus maintainers, building first-class integration with Prometheus into Grafana, and ensuring Grafana customers receive Prometheus features they need.
What’s the difference between Prometheus and Grafana?
Prometheus project
Prometheus is a simple way to store time series metrics. It provides users with the tools they need to collect, store, check, and query metrics.
- Simple text-based metrics format
- Rich, concise query language
- Single process, no dependencies
Both
Together, Prometheus and Grafana allow users to store large amounts of metrics that they can easily slice and break down to understand how their system is behaving.
- Strong community
- Easy to use
- Open source
Grafana
Grafana renders metrics into powerful, flexible visualizations. It allows users to import Prometheus performance metrics as a data source and visualize the metrics as graphs and dashboards.
- Powerful, flexible dashboarding capabilities
- Robust ecosystem of plugins so users can view their data, wherever it lives
- Share data and foster a data-driven culture
Why Grafana?
- Centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated architecture enables you to easily manage and maintain your Prometheus implementation based on your specific architecture.
- With a fully assembled and configured monitoring stack out of the box, there’s no need to build systems from open source components.
- Best-in-class query performance means you can quickly create real-time dashboards that can be shared throughout your organization.
- Robust data-access policies enable administrators to secure and govern your metrics data.
Traditional tools
- Scale is limited to a single machine
- Lacks data governance, resulting in all-or-nothing access to metrics
- Requires a lot of effort to deploy and maintain
Grafana’s approach
- Centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated architecture
- Centralized access control and authentication
- Easily deploy a new tenant in seconds
Extending Prometheus with Grafana
Prometheus project
Centralize the analysis, visualization, and alerting on all of your Prometheus metrics with Grafana.
Install, administer, and maintain your own instance.
Cloud Metrics
Offered as a fully managed service, Grafana Cloud Metrics is a super fast massively and highly available Prometheus compatible backend.
Managed and administered by Grafana Labs with free and paid options for individuals, teams, and large enterprises.
Includes a robust free tier with access to 10k metrics.
Enterprise Metrics
A self-managed Prometheus service that is seamless to use, simple to operate/maintain, and supported by Grafana Labs.
For organizations that have specific privacy or security requirements and need a self-managed environment.
No one knows Prometheus like we do
Grafana Labs is proud to support the development of the Prometheus project by employing Prometheus maintainers and contributors. And we’re hiring!
Featured Prometheus videos
Prometheus resources
