Prometheus Questions & Answers

Thanos, Cortex, VictoriaMetrics, and Grafana Mimir extend Prometheus with durable, scalable long-term metric storage.

Teams switch due to Prometheus's scaling limits, high-cardinality struggles, lack of native long-term storage, and PromQL's learning curve.

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.