Horizontally scalable, multi-tenant long-term storage for Prometheus metrics; a CNCF project.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (Apache-2.0)
- Self-hosted
- Yes
- Launched
- 2016
- Status
- Active
- Website
- cortexmetrics.io
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Metrics and time-series databases checklist
7 of 10 confirmed in Cortex's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Metrics.
- PromQL or compatible queries Yes
- Prometheus remote write Yes
- OTLP metrics ingest Yes
- Long-term storage Yes
- Clustering or high availability Yes
- Downsampling Not confirmed
- Alert rule evaluation Yes
- Multi-tenancy Yes
- Built-in query UI No
- Managed hosted service No
No query UI of its own; docs pair it with Grafana. No project-run hosted service.
Checked against: github.com, cortexmetrics.io, cortexmetrics.io (2), cortexmetrics.io (3)
Alternatives to Cortex
Other metrics and time-series databases tools. See all 11.
-
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus Serverless, Prometheus-compatible metrics store on AWS: remote-write metrics from EKS or other clusters and query them with PromQL. -
Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus Google Cloud's managed Prometheus backend on Monarch: collect with managed or self-deployed collectors, query with PromQL, billed per sample ingested. -
Grafana Mimir Horizontally scalable, multi-tenant long-term storage for Prometheus metrics from Grafana Labs, backed by object storage. -
Graphite Time-series metrics storage and graphing: Carbon receives metrics, Whisper stores them, and Graphite-web renders graphs and serves a query API. -
InfluxDB Time-series database for metrics and events; InfluxDB 3 Core is open source, with Enterprise and managed cloud editions. -
Nightingale Open source alerting and dashboard platform that sits on Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Elasticsearch and other sources, with alert rules and notification routing. -
Prometheus CNCF metrics system that scrapes time series from exporters and apps, stores them locally, and evaluates PromQL alert rules that it sends to Alertmanager. -
Thanos Adds a global query view, high availability and long-term object-storage retention to existing Prometheus servers; a CNCF project. -
VictoriaMetrics Prometheus-compatible time-series database and monitoring stack in single-node and cluster versions, with enterprise and managed cloud editions. - Telegraf InfluxData's plugin-based agent that collects metrics and events from systems, services and APIs and writes them to InfluxDB, Prometheus and many other outputs.