Prometheus is an open-source metric collection and monitoring solution designed for the cloud-native world. Inspired by Google's internal Borgmon system, it brings industrial-grade monitoring to the open-source world and is a graduated CNCF project (the second after Kubernetes).

Its core relies on a dimensional data model: time series are identified by a metric name and key-value pairs, allowing for fine-grained data partitioning. The PromQL query language enables powerful querying, correlation, and transformation of these series, while a dedicated component, Alertmanager, handles precise alert management and dissemination.

Prometheus emphasizes operational simplicity: each server is autonomous, relies on local storage, and is deployed as a statically linked Go binary. A large ecosystem of instrumentation libraries and hundreds of exporters allows metrics to be collected from virtually any system. All of this is distributed under the Apache 2 license.