Cortex: Scalable Prometheus Metrics
Shriira Press
Prometheus as a service. Scale metrics horizontally with Cortex — durable long-term storage, high availability, and multi-tenancy for Prometheus.
Welcome to Cortex: Scalable Prometheus Metrics.
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage system for Prometheus metrics — turning Prometheus from a single-server tool into a clustered metrics platform. This free book teaches it from the ground up: the Prometheus scaling problem and what Cortex is, the Prometheus data model and where it hits limits, Cortex's microservices architecture, the write path (remote write, distributors, ingesters), storage (blocks in object storage, the compactor), the read path (query-frontend, querier, store-gateway), multi-tenancy (isolation, per-tenant limits, the platform model), scalability and high availability (the hash ring, sharding, replication), alerting and rules and the ecosystem (Grafana, Thanos, Mimir), and operating Cortex in practice. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that demystify how a scalable, long-term, multi-tenant metrics platform works — Prometheus monitoring, delivered as an organization-wide service.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press