Prometheus
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 16 observability platforms by recommenders
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.
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.
72 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 48
- criticize it
- 24
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 48 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Easy to set up and run
“You can get started ASAP on Prometheus whereas you get lost in analysis-paralysis when dealing with OTel.”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)” “They are accurate because they're simple and they're easy to work with because they're simple”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)” “didn't find prometheus particularly difficult to manage in a production environment”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” - Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”
- Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Airbnb discloses a billion-series Prometheus metrics pipeline”
- Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
- Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”
Pairs well with Grafana dashboards
“I have Grafana and Prometheus set up for observability and was surprised with insights I gained”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “Sharing performance benchmarks of MERN SSR CMS” “I've even had it output prometheus metrics so I can create nice dashboards in grafana”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “10 years of personal finances in plain text files” “I've had a grafana + prometheus setup on my servers since like 2017.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” - Comment from 31 Jul 2026 in “The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem”
- Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
- Comment from 3 May 2026 in “I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now”
Integrates with exporters and other tools
“we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: Multi-agent workflows in production; Where people using 1000s of agents?” “The DLQ and Prometheus integration out of the box are nice.”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: DuckDB for Kafka Stream Processing” “Just export to existing metrics software like Prometheus.”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: SQL-tap – Real-time SQL traffic viewer for PostgreSQL and MySQL” - Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"”
- Comment from 28 Dec 2025 in “The Dangers of SSL Certificates”
Cheaper than commercial alternatives
“Several of us were working hard to move everything into Prometheus that made any sense to be in Prometheus instead of Splunk.”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Bloom filters are good for search that does not scale” “We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “AI Is Killing B2B SaaS” “we did it with 1/10 the cost with Prometheus-1.0”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Doesn't scale without Mimir or Thanos
“Prometheus (by itself) doesn't scale - you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar).”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “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.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “prometheus assumes too much happy path. It assumes that a single node is enough for time series data that is used for alerting.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” - Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Ten Years of Deploying to Production”
Complex stack to run
“Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc.”
Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “I Think about Kubernetes” “I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “tends to outweigh the application itself ito cost and complexity”
Comment from 29 Jul 2026 in “Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and Grafana” Needs external tooling for gaps
“Prometheus makes it your problem to solve with external tooling, and most people don't, until they need it.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “prometheus is not gonna magically solve that problem for you”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
Other observability platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other observability platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 16 observability platforms, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 84 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“metrics store of your choice like Prometheus or Mimir”
“I have Grafana and Prometheus set up for observability and was surprised with insights I gained”
“we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus”
“a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get”
“You can get started ASAP on Prometheus whereas you get lost in analysis-paralysis when dealing with OTel.”
“Prometheus is so easy to add and if you need more scale, there is mimir”
“I’ve built custom Prometheus metrics very easily”
“They are accurate because they're simple and they're easy to work with because they're simple”
“really worth learning how prometheus and grafana heatmaps combine”
“tends to outweigh the application itself ito cost and complexity”
“we did it with 1/10 the cost with Prometheus-1.0”
“This is what I've done, together with alerts from various things”
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)”
“didn't find prometheus particularly difficult to manage in a production environment”
“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.”
“prometheus is not gonna magically solve that problem for you”
“Prometheus makes it your problem to solve with external tooling, and most people don't, until they need it.”
“prometheus assumes too much happy path. It assumes that a single node is enough for time series data that is used for alerting.”
“Prometheus, Thanos and even OpenTelemetry are full of those kind of problems”
“Prometheus (by itself) doesn't scale - you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar).”
“found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
“I prefer to use it graphana + loki + Prometheus setup”
“pretty much instant Prometheus event reacting to metrics”
“Prometheus with 2TB of metrics takes _forever_ to start up.”
“the Prometheus metrics endpoint works and is so simple”
“Prometheus/Grafana is the right call for token spend visibility”
“we're hitting the exact same scaling walls these systems had before”
“Just export to existing metrics software like Prometheus.”
“We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.”
“The metrics I monitor with prometheus and grafana are useful, vital even, but they are always fighting the last war.”
“I've even had it output prometheus metrics so I can create nice dashboards in grafana”
“For example by using Prometheus and ssl_exporter”
“Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc.”
“The DLQ and Prometheus integration out of the box are nice.”
“I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel”
“You need something to tell you when your tiny app isn't running”
“I've had a grafana + prometheus setup on my servers since like 2017.”
“Prometheus and Jaeger are very solid, battle-hardened, popular, well-maintained, easily self-hosted open-source projects.”
“I feel the pull-based approach is superior overall but still make heavy use of it.”
“Several of us were working hard to move everything into Prometheus that made any sense to be in Prometheus instead of Splunk.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.