M3DB is an open-source distributed time-series database, originally created by Uber to store monitoring metrics at very large scale and over long retention periods. Written entirely in Go with no external dependencies, it has proven itself in production by ingesting over one billion points per second.

M3DB integrates naturally with existing observability ecosystems: it accepts ingestion in Prometheus, StatsD, and Carbon formats, and responds to PromQL and Graphite queries. Its embedded inverted index accelerates label-based searches, while its aggregation engine handles downsampling to optimize long-term storage.

Its optimized compression — up to approximately 11× — makes retaining months or years of metrics economically viable. Distributed, replicated, and designed for horizontal scaling, M3DB deploys as a cluster on sovereign infrastructure where your infrastructure and production metrics remain fully under your control.