Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting platform that collects metrics using an HTTP pull model and stores them in a time series database. It is written in Go, licensed under Apache 2.0, and is one of the most widely used tools in the cloud-native ecosystem.
Prometheus is built around a multi-dimensional data model in which each measurement is identified by labels, enabling flexible and powerful querying via PromQL. The system operates autonomously without dependencies on distributed storage and is often paired with Grafana for advanced visualization. With built-in service discovery and exporters for most languages and systems, it’s easy to integrate in both containerized environments and traditional infrastructures.
The project was started in 2012 at SoundCloud and is today a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is actively developed on GitHub, has extensive documentation, and is used globally to manage everything from container clusters to microservices in production.


