Infra & metrics
Prometheus
open source / community (CNCF)
The de-facto standard pull-based metrics engine and time-series database for cloud-native and Kubernetes monitoring; everything else in the space orbits it.
- Category
- Infra & metrics
- License
- Open source
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Cost
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Self-host effort
- Heavy
- Maturity
- Incumbent
- Popularity
- ≈64k GitHub stars; category center of gravity
The catch
Single-node by design — no native HA or long-term storage — so any serious deployment becomes a 4-5 component stack (Alertmanager, Grafana, Thanos/Mimir, exporters) you assemble and operate yourself.
Monitors
Protocols
Capabilities
Built for
The honest take
The cloud-native default — and the wrong tool to call “a product.” You’re adopting a stack: Prometheus + Alertmanager + Grafana, plus Thanos or Mimir the moment you need HA or history, plus an exporter per thing. For traditional SNMP networks, snmp_exporter works but it’s the clunky path; Zabbix is usually the gentler escape from SolarWinds.
Pricing in the real world
- Software $0
- Grafana Enterprise support optional $10-30k/yr
Free software; cost is engineering time + the surrounding stack.