# Prometheus 48 Hacker News commenters recommended Prometheus and 24 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Free open-source monitoring system people use with Grafana to collect and alert on metrics, valued for simplicity. Caveat: a single node doesn't scale well and needs Mimir or Thanos. ## Why people recommend it - Easy to set up and run (7 comments): "You can get started ASAP on Prometheus whereas you get lost in analysis-paralysis when dealing with OTel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396324)) "They are accurate because they're simple and they're easy to work with because they're simple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49395735)) "didn't find prometheus particularly difficult to manage in a production environment" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48128939)) - Pairs well with Grafana dashboards (6 comments): "I have Grafana and Prometheus set up for observability and was surprised with insights I gained" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146856)) "I've even had it output prometheus metrics so I can create nice dashboards in grafana" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464943)) "I've had a grafana + prometheus setup on my servers since like 2017." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937612)) - Integrates with exporters and other tools (5 comments): "we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692412)) "The DLQ and Prometheus integration out of the box are nice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195882)) "Just export to existing metrics software like Prometheus." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017921)) - Cheaper than commercial alternatives (3 comments): "Several of us were working hard to move everything into Prometheus that made any sense to be in Prometheus instead of Splunk." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813643)) "We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46893681)) "we did it with 1/10 the cost with Prometheus-1.0" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030022)) ## What people warn about - Doesn't scale without Mimir or Thanos (4 comments): "Prometheus (by itself) doesn't scale - you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121185)) "Prometheus doesn't because it optimised intentionally for being easy to deploy and for there being a hierarchy of prometheus's in a tree-like formation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121988)) "prometheus assumes too much happy path. It assumes that a single node is enough for time series data that is used for alerting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121412)) - Complex stack to run (3 comments): "Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396582)) "I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48130681)) "tends to outweigh the application itself ito cost and complexity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49094203)) - Needs external tooling for gaps (2 comments): "Prometheus makes it your problem to solve with external tooling, and most people don't, until they need it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121662)) "prometheus is not gonna magically solve that problem for you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121809)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Grafana](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grafana.md): 71 recommend - [Datadog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/datadog.md): 40 recommend - [Sentry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sentry.md): 31 recommend - [SigNoz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/signoz.md): 19 recommend - [Superlog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/superlog.md): 15 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Prometheus", https://hackerapproved.com/p/prometheus/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).