Free, open-source time-series metrics collection and alerting tool with PromQL, self-hosted, no managed offering.
Prometheus collects time-series metrics using a dimensional data model with flexible labels, queried through PromQL, with a built-in alerting rule engine paired with Alertmanager for notification routing. Hundreds of official and community exporters extract metrics from existing systems.
It is entirely free and open source under Apache 2.0, with no paid tier or official managed version: teams self-host and operate storage, scaling and high availability themselves. It suits a developer or infrastructure team comfortable running their own monitoring stack, paired with a separate tool like Grafana for dashboards.
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Entirely free and open source under Apache 2.0 with no paid tier from the project, so the only cost is self-hosting infrastructure, unmatched by a commercial equivalent at the same price.
No official managed version exists: teams must self-host and operate storage, scaling and high availability themselves, and there is no built-in dashboarding UI, so a first useful result needs real setup work.
The dimensional data model, PromQL and built-in alerting rule engine deliver real-time metric collection and alerting as described, paired with Alertmanager for routing.
Hundreds of official and community exporters plus a dedicated query language (PromQL) cover most metric-extraction needs, though it stops at metrics and alerting without built-in dashboarding.
Fully open source and self-hosted with no vendor lock-in: the data, configuration and binaries stay under the team's own control at all times.
