# Prometheus

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/prometheus  
**Vertical:** IT Operations & Observability  
**Subcategory:** Open Source Monitoring  
**Tier:** Leader  
**Website:** prometheus.io  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

CNCF-graduated open-source monitoring toolkit standard for Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure; PromQL, pull-based scraping, and Alertmanager with managed offerings from Grafana Labs and cloud providers.

## Company Overview

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit — originally developed at SoundCloud in 2012 and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016, where it became the second CNCF project to graduate (after Kubernetes). Prometheus collects time-series metrics from applications and infrastructure through a pull-based model (scraping HTTP endpoints), stores them in a local time-series database, and provides PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) for flexible metric analysis and alert definition. The Prometheus ecosystem is maintained by the open-source community with major contributions from Grafana Labs, Red Hat, and cloud providers.

Prometheus's architecture is designed for reliability in distributed systems: each Prometheus server operates independently without clustering or distributed state, making it resilient to network partitions and easy to understand operationally. The metric format (OpenMetrics) has become a de facto standard for how cloud-native applications expose performance data — Kubernetes, Istio, and virtually every major cloud-native project exports Prometheus-format metrics. Alertmanager handles routing and deduplication of alerts. Grafana (separate project) is the most common visualization layer for Prometheus metrics.

In 2025, Prometheus is used as the foundational monitoring layer in most Kubernetes deployments worldwide and competes — as a managed, hosted offering — through Grafana Cloud (Grafana Labs), Cortex/Thanos (horizontal scalability extensions), and cloud provider managed Prometheus services (Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus) for enterprise monitoring infrastructure. The open-source Prometheus ecosystem faces no direct competition for its core use case, but commercial support and managed hosting are provided by Grafana Labs (which raised $240M at $6B valuation), Chronosphere, and the cloud providers. The ecosystem's 2025 development focuses on OpenTelemetry compatibility, agent-based collection (Prometheus Agent Mode), and scaling the storage engine for multi-billion-series deployments.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is Prometheus?
Prometheus Prometheus serves teams as open-source monitoring and alerting system with time-series database, CNCF graduated project, following 2012 Matt T. Proud founding with Julius Volz at SoundCloud

### When was Prometheus founded?
Prometheus was founded in 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Matt T. Proud and Julius Volz (SoundCloud) created Prometheus in Berlin in 2012 as open-source monitoring and alerting system with time-series database for metrics collection using pull model and service discovery with PromQL query language and Alertmanager, became CNCF graduated project as cloud-native monitoring standard with Kubernetes integration, Grafana visualization, exporters ecosystem, and HTTP endpoints for metrics scraping.

### What are Prometheus's major milestones?
Prometheus's history includes several key milestones: 2012: Prometheus Created SoundCloud 2016: CNCF Incubation 2018: CNCF Graduation 2024: Cloud-Native Monitoring Standard

### What is Prometheus's mission?
Prometheus's mission is to Provide reliable monitoring for dynamic cloud environments.

### Who founded Prometheus?
Prometheus was founded by Matt T. Proud. SoundCloud engineers who built cloud-native monitoring system

### What products or services does Prometheus offer?
Prometheus Prometheus serves teams as open-source monitoring and alerting system with time-series database, CNCF graduated project, following 2012 Matt T. Proud founding with Julius Volz at SoundCloud

### Who uses Prometheus?
Prometheus Prometheus serves teams as open-source monitoring and alerting system with time-series database, CNCF graduated project, following 2012 Matt T. Proud founding with Julius Volz at SoundCloud

### How does PromQL work and what are the most common query patterns for infrastructure monitoring?
PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) is a functional query language for selecting and aggregating time-series metrics stored in Prometheus — it allows engineers to write expressions that filter metrics by label dimensions and apply functions like rate() (per-second change rate over a time window), increase() (total increase over a period), histogram_quantile() (percentile calculation from histogram buckets), and avg() or sum() aggregations across label dimensions. Common monitoring patterns include alerting when error rate exceeds a threshold (rate(http_requests_total{status=~'5..'}[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total[5m]) > 0.01), tracking memory utilization (container_memory_usage_bytes / container_spec_memory_limit_bytes), and measuring service latency at p99 using histogram quantiles. Grafana dashboards typically execute these PromQL queries to visualize metrics in real time.

## Tags

analytics, b2b, infrastructure, open-source, cloud-native, saas

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*