Prometheus Reviews & Product Details

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It collects and stores metrics as time series data, enabling real-time monitoring of applications, systems, and services. With its powerful query language, PromQL, users can analyze and visualize data effectively. Prometheus operates independently, requiring no external dependencies, and integrates seamlessly with various service discovery mechanisms, making it ideal for dynamic environments. Key Features and Functionality: - Dimensional Data Model: Prometheus organizes time series data using a flexible dimensional model, identifying each series by a metric name and a set of key-value pairs. - Powerful Query Language (PromQL): PromQL allows users to query, correlate, and transform time series data for visualizations, alerts, and more. - Precise Alerting: Alerting rules based on PromQL leverage the dimensional data model, with a separate Alertmanager component handling notifications and silencing. - Simple Operation: Prometheus servers function independently, relying solely on local storage. Developed in Go, the statically linked binaries are easy to deploy across various environments. - Instrumentation Libraries: A wide range of official and community-contributed libraries are available for instrumenting applications in most major programming languages. - Ubiquitous Integrations: Prometheus offers numerous integrations, facilitating easy extraction of metrics from existing systems. Primary Value and Problem Solved: Prometheus addresses the need for a robust, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution in modern, dynamic environments. Its ability to collect, store, and query time series data empowers organizations to gain real-time insights into their systems' performance and health. By providing precise alerting and seamless integration with various service discovery mechanisms, Prometheus ensures that issues are detected and addressed promptly, enhancing system reliability and operational efficiency.

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Prometheus Authors

Discussions

Prometheus Community

Solution Type

Best-of-Breed

Overview by

Ravi S R

Value at a Glance

Averages based on real user reviews.

Time to Implement

2 months

Return on Investment

10 months

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User Insights

Average based on 60 real user reviews.

Implementation Time

2 months

Perceived Cost

$$$$$

Prometheus Integrations

(3)

Integration information sourced from real user reviews.

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Justin S.

System Administrator

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

11/7/2019

"The monitoring way of the future"

5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

The entire product stack is open source. Far more flexible than traditional monitoring solutions like Nagios. A wide variety of Prometheus metric exporters already in the community, and many open source products are natively incorporating Prometheus exporters. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

Prometheus developers and export developers have punted on security by leaving implementation up to other products. I get that they want to focus on the core of the product, but virtually every other product out there features support for authentication and authorization right out of the box. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

Nagios was our first monitoring product. We went with Nagios XI for the same reason people buy Cisco switches - nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco hardware, and nobody ever got fired for going with Nagios for monitoring. However, as we grew, we found that Nagios XI doesn't really scale. In addition, both the checks and agent were community maintained and often poorly maintained at that.

We went from Nagios to Sensu - specifically, Sensu Go, which is a greatly improved rewrite of the original codebase. Sensu Go has a really interesting architecture - it's got its own built-in mechanism, Assets, for distributing checks, and the agents are maintained by the company. But the documentation and web UI were terrible, and you were still dependent on writing all checks yourself or sourcing old Nagios checks from the community.

After Sensu more than doubled its support costs year-over-year, we decided that we'd had enough, and I finally gave Prometheus a try. My DevOps friends had been raving about how well it's designed, now I can see why. It's trivial to set up; there's a vast array of strongly-supported exporters, and it's far more flexible than simply checking whether something is running or not.

And it does scale, either through sharding instances or through other projects like Thanos. Nagios is waaay over the hill, and it shows. Sensu isn't much further behind unless they can get their act in order. I see positive things for us and Prometheus. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rohit N.

Principal Software Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/4/2020

"Blazing fast, reliable & free TSDB"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

It works on the pull model. This helps the TSDB to decide at what rate it wants to pull the data from the clients. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

It only supports HTTP APIs to pull the data into the DB. I wish it could add more methods like S3 pull etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Prometheus:

It's reliable and free to use. There is great community support. Fully configurable to pull data from various sources via API calls and the rate at which the data is added can be controlled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

Adding system metrics data every minute from across the cluster and dashboarding using Grafana. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

5/1/2020

"Amazing open source tool for monitoring, very customizable"

5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

Approach and philosophy, auto discovery. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

Not very easy to start with the product. Learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Matt C.

Senior Software Engineer - SRE

Computer Software

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/29/2019

"A Deep Well of Metrics"

5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

The depth and granularity of the metrics made available by Prometheus are better than any monitoring tool I have used to date. The configuration documentation is long but covers everything in great detail. There was not an issue creating the service accounts, setting user permissions or building our first configuration files. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

This is not an easy setup. It's not insurmountable and the documentation is good but the configurations of user accounts and configuration files takes time. Node exporters for Windows are an agent install which must be done at the machine which slows down Windows deployment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Prometheus:

Completely worth the time implementing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed a system monitoring tool that offered both whitebox and blackbox monitoring tools for a mixed OS environment. It also needed to be light on network resources. Prometheus provides all of these things which has given us faster access to the data we need to keep our networks up and healthy. The most improved area is monitoring our SQL database systems. We get instant feedback on our dashboards when these services are in trouble. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Internet

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/17/2019

Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.

"Decent tool for the cloud immutable infrastructure monitoring and alerting"

5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

Easy redeployable, very fast database (even the giant queries are running super-fast), concept of the services monitoring instead of the instances monitoring. Really adequate queries syntax, simple alerting, in-house integration with the Grafana. It's already has the exporters for more-or-less whatever technology you are using. Even if there are no exporters for your specific system or needs, you are always able to write your own one on the whatever language you want, it's literally perfect Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

Starting from 2.x version, there are probably no weak points, the Prometheus team is really doing the great job Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Prometheus:

From my perspective, Prometheus will be completely useless in the stable datacenter-based setups, because it's created for the immutable and fast-changing infrastructures. Also, if you're using the old versions (1.x) -- the storage engine is not really good, they've improved it only in 2.x branch Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

Correct monitoring and alerting, which will be reliable with the fully-cloud immutable infrastructure. We've got the immutable-itself monitoring, which is perfectly customizable and redeployable via the simple pipelines. Also, the ability to write your own exporters is decent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

10/23/2019

"Prometheus"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

It is very simple to use and has no external dependencies. It has a powerful query language to retrieve and evaluate metrics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

Using it little bit difficult. Routing from different ports is difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/25/2019

"Prometheues from dev to prod"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

i like that its really light weighted and is compatible to collect data from many exporters Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

i dont like the alert manager part , its really complex and we find difficulties to configure using equations and promQL stuff Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Raghu C.

Customer Reliability Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/30/2019

"Extremely good opensoucre monitoring tool"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

Detailed monitoring of any metrics can be measured. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

The learning curve is bit steep and also there is no unique identifier for alerts generated by the Alertmanager. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Prometheus:

Prometheus is an essential tool for companies operating in the cloud and it's free, however the learning curve is bit steep and it might need some time to configure the system properly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring of our cloud micro services in our Kubernetes configuration and also the ability to forecast alerts based on the rate of existing system is really helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/6/2018

"Handsdown a great monitoring tool when bundled with grafana"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

Seamless deployment on openshift, works well out of the box, very easy to onboard services to it and to get started with, production level quality. Grafana to visualize the metrics is a game changer and to monitoring the services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

The UI could be better and made easier to onbaord services, the documentation is somewhat lacking and needs better examples and use-cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Architecture & Planning

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/1/2018

"Great Tool "

5/5

What do you like best about Prometheus?

Prometheus is very user friendly. It helps keep our business organized and it quite easy and fast to use and adapt to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Prometheus?

Some features aren't useful to me. These are "extra" features that would certainly be useful to others, but would take me longer to learn than is useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Prometheus:

I would definitely recommend using Prometheus if you are trying to streamline services. Even in a small company like ours, it has an important role. However, it could be financially prohibitive in some cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Prometheus solving and how is that benefiting you?

Prometheus helps keep our business organized and on track. It has saved time and helps streamline services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.