Prometheus

What is Prometheus?

Collects time series metrics from servers and apps, with the PromQL query language and alert rules.

Who is Prometheus best for?

Prometheus is best for SRE and platform teams that need metrics and alerts for services on Kubernetes or plain servers.

• Kubernetes clusters

  Prometheus discovers services in Kubernetes and other container managers and keeps scraping them as they change.

• Alerting on service health

  Alert rules are written in PromQL, and the separate Alertmanager handles notifications and silencing.

• Instrumenting your own code

  Client libraries cover most major languages, and hundreds of integrations pull metrics from existing systems.

• Monitoring that survives outages

  Each server stands alone on local storage, so it keeps working when other parts of your stack fail.

How much does Prometheus cost?

Prometheus is free and open source under Apache 2.0, with no paid edition or hosted plan from the project itself.

Prometheus is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project and sells nothing; your costs are the servers and disks it runs on. Full pricing on github.com. We checked these prices on 8 Nov 2026.

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Is Prometheus open source?

Yes. Prometheus's code is public under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can run it on your own server.

Host it on a serverHostinger, DigitalOcean, Railway, Elestio, Vultr and Akamai Cloud set it up on a server for you with a one-click install.

Hosting with

What are the best Prometheus alternatives?

Prometheus is an open source alternative to Middleware and Dash0. Grafana Loki, Grafana, Netdata and SigNoz do the same job and are open source too.

MiddlewareFree

Full-stack observability with an AI SRE agent.

Dash0Freemium

Logs, metrics and traces unified, OpenTelemetry-native.

Grafana LokiOpen Source

Log aggregation system that indexes labels rather than full text, so large log volumes stay cheap.

GrafanaOpen Source

Charts metrics, logs and traces from Prometheus, SQL databases and 150+ other data sources.

NetdataOpen Source

Per-second monitoring agent for servers, containers and apps, with dashboards and alerts.

SigNozOpen Source

Observability platform with logs, metrics, traces and alerts in one place, built on OpenTelemetry.

Questions about Prometheus