Prometheus in Practice Powerful Flexible but Not Plug-and-Play
May 27, 2025

Prometheus in Practice Powerful Flexible but Not Plug-and-Play

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Prometheus

We use Prometheus to scrape metrics from our Linux servers, Kubernetes clusters, Docker containers, and cloud infrastructure. Our development teams instrument custom applications using Prometheus client libraries (Python, Go, Java) to expose application-specific metrics such as request latency, error rates, and queue lengths. Prometheus also works in tandem with Alertmanager to send alerts to our on-call engineers via Slack, PagerDuty, and email.

Pros

  • Alerting
  • Faster Incident Response
  • Monitoring

Cons

  • Long-term storage limitations
  • Lack of native built-in auth
  • Improved System Reliability and Uptime
  • Faster Incident Response and MTTR
  • Lack of Built-In Security or Multi-Tenancy
Prometheus is relatively easy to deploy and starts scraping metrics quickly with minimal config. Seamless service discovery and scraping for cloud-native workloads. There is no built-in RBAC or tenant isolation, which makes secure and shared use harder.
It is easier to setup, but learning curve is quite moderately steep. Prometheus is a best-in-class tool for engineers and SREs in cloud-native environments. When extended with tools like Thanos or Cortex, it can rival commercial platforms in scale and capability—but requires more effort.

Do you think Prometheus delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Prometheus's feature set?

Yes

Did Prometheus live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Prometheus go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Prometheus again?

Yes

Prometheus integrates deeply with Kubernetes via built-in service discovery and exporters like kube-state-metrics and cAdvisor. Prometheus is ideal for scraping metrics from many small services with client libraries available in major languages. Prometheus is a pull-based system with short default retention (typically 15-30 days). Querying large time windows is not efficient.

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