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Self-operated metrics and alerting

Prometheus

An Apache-2.0 open-source monitoring system and time-series database with pull-based collection, PromQL, rules, exporters, and Alertmanager integration.

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Editorial verdict

Choose Prometheus when the team deliberately wants self-operated metrics and alerting and can own the entire reliability and lifecycle boundary.12

Best for

  • Machine-centric and dynamic infrastructure metrics
  • Teams requiring PromQL and exporter ecosystem control
  • Organizations able to operate storage, HA, rules, and Alertmanager
12

Not ideal for

  • Teams wanting a managed suite
  • Long-term clustered storage without another architecture
  • Organizations unable to govern cardinality, upgrades, security, and support
12
Main trade-off

Open-source control and ecosystem portability are gained with full ownership of collection, cardinality, storage, redundancy, dashboards, alert routing, security, upgrades, and operations.12

Product boundary

Whether self-operated Prometheus control justifies owning metric collection, storage, scaling, high availability, dashboards, alerting, and support.

Prometheus is a self-operated monitoring system with local storage by default. It is not Grafana Cloud, a generic Prometheus-compatible backend, or a managed service with bundled storage, dashboards, and support.12

For: Platform and SRE teams able to operate an open-source metrics and alerting system

  • The team cannot operate reliable storage and HA.
  • Cardinality or retention requires a managed scalable backend.
  • Bundled APM, logs, or enterprise support is the leading requirement.

Why teams consider Prometheus

  • Open-source controlPrometheus is independently governed and Apache-2.0 licensed.12
  • Metrics modelPromQL and labeled time series support dynamic infrastructure.12
  • EcosystemExporters, service discovery, rules, and Alertmanager compose the monitoring system.12

Pricing

Prometheus is open-source software with no separate software license fee; total cost is infrastructure, storage, redundancy, backups, networking, exporters, dashboards, alerting, security, support, upgrades, and engineering.12

Self-operated monitoring

Prometheus OSS plus infrastructure

Model compute, local or remote storage, HA replicas, backups, network, dashboards, Alertmanager, security, support, upgrades, and on-call.12

License
Apache License 2.012
Operational boundary
No separate software fee does not mean free operations12
Pricing checked View official pricing

Prometheus vs alternatives

Grafana Cloud

Choose when
Choose managed Prometheus-compatible metrics, Grafana applications, and support.
Avoid when
Managed platform dependence or series-based pricing is unacceptable.
Compared with Prometheus
Managed backends reduce operations while retaining collector and label responsibilities.56

Datadog

Choose when
Choose broad managed infrastructure and full-stack observability.
Avoid when
Agent, suite, and host/product pricing are unacceptable.
Compared with Prometheus
Managed cross-signal breadth replaces open-source control.78

New Relic

Choose when
Choose managed infrastructure and APM with ingest-led pricing.
Avoid when
Ingest, retention, access, or platform dependence does not fit.
Compared with Prometheus
Managed broad coverage replaces self-operated metrics ownership.910

Resources and sources

Official product, policy, and pricing

  • Prometheus overview
    Open
  • Prometheus storage
    Open
  • Prometheus metric and label naming
    Open
  • Prometheus Apache 2.0 license
    Open
  1. 1
    Prometheus overview

    Prometheus · Accessed Official

  2. 2
    Prometheus storage

    Prometheus · Accessed Official

  3. 3
    Prometheus metric and label naming

    Prometheus · Accessed Official

  4. 4
    Prometheus Apache 2.0 license

    Prometheus · Accessed Official

  5. 5
    Grafana Cloud infrastructure monitoring

    Grafana Labs · Accessed Official

  6. 6
    Grafana Cloud Metrics invoice

    Grafana Labs · Accessed Official

  7. 7
    Datadog Host Map

    Datadog · Accessed Official

  8. 8
    Datadog pricing

    Datadog · Accessed Official

  9. 9
    New Relic infrastructure monitoring

    New Relic · Accessed Official

  10. 10
    New Relic pricing

    New Relic · Accessed Official