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Prometheus

Monitor app performance, get alerts, and gain insights with an intuitive dashboard.

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What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting system designed for tracking application and infrastructure performance. It collects metrics from your systems at regular intervals, stores them in a time-series database, and lets you query and visualise the data through an intuitive dashboard. You can set up alerts based on specific conditions, such as high CPU usage or slow response times, which trigger notifications to your team. Prometheus works particularly well in containerised and microservices environments, though it's suitable for monitoring any application. The tool is free to use and self-hosted, giving you full control over your monitoring data.

Key features

Metric collection

Scrapes metrics from applications and services on a configurable schedule

Time-series database

Stores metrics with timestamps for historical analysis and trend tracking

Alert rules

Define conditions that trigger notifications when thresholds are breached

Query language

PromQL allows you to slice and combine metrics in flexible ways

Visualisation dashboard

Built-in simple dashboard plus integration with tools like Grafana for richer visuals

Service discovery

Automatically finds and monitors new instances in dynamic environments

Pros & cons

Advantages

  • Free and open-source, with no licensing costs or vendor lock-in
  • Lightweight and efficient; runs well on modest hardware
  • Strong community and extensive documentation, particularly for Kubernetes and cloud-native setups
  • Flexible alerting with support for multiple notification channels

Limitations

  • Requires manual setup and configuration; not a managed service unless you use a third-party hosted option
  • The built-in dashboard is basic; most users pair it with Grafana for better visualisation
  • Pull-based metric collection can be challenging in some network architectures where you cannot reach systems directly

Use cases

Monitoring Kubernetes clusters and containerised applications

Tracking system metrics like CPU, memory, and disk usage across servers

Detecting and alerting on application performance degradation in real time

Building custom dashboards to understand service dependencies and behaviour

Analysing historical trends to identify capacity or performance issues

Ready to try Prometheus?

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Pricing

Free

Free

Full access to all core features; self-hosted; unlimited metrics and storage (limited by your own hardware)

Get started with Prometheus

Click through to Prometheus and start using it now.

Try Prometheus free
  • Free plan available
  • No credit card