Prometheus Questions & Answers

Even though Prometheus itself is open source and free to download, there are hidden costs you’ll want to budget for: paying for the infrastructure and storage to host/scale it, especially if you keep long-term metrics or run in big environments; the staff time and expertise needed to maintain, scale, and troubleshoot your setup; possible managed service fees if you choose a cloud provider or vendor; and extra costs for backup, long-term storage solutions (like Thanos/Cortex), alerting/visualization tools, and operational overhead that come with DIY deployments rather than a managed observability stack.