Prometheus and Grafana have thriving open-source communities. Here’s how to stay connected and explore the ecosystem.
CNCF Landscape
Prometheus is a CNCF graduated project (alongside Kubernetes). The observability ecosystem includes:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CNCF Observability │
├──────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────┤
│ Metrics │ Logging │ Tracing │
│ │ │ │
│ Prometheus │ Fluentd │ Jaeger │
│ Thanos │ Loki │ Zipkin │
│ Cortex/Mimir │ Vector │ Tempo │
│ OpenMetrics │ │ │
├──────────────┴──────────────┴───────────────┤
│ OpenTelemetry (unified) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
OpenTelemetry — The Future
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the next step in observability — it unifies metrics, logs, and traces into a single framework.
| Feature |
Prometheus |
OpenTelemetry |
| Metrics |
Native |
Supported (OTLP → Prometheus) |
| Traces |
No |
Native |
| Logs |
No |
Native |
| Protocol |
Scrape (pull) |
OTLP (push or pull) |
| Vendor neutral |
Yes |
Yes |
Prometheus can ingest OpenTelemetry metrics via OTLP receiver (experimental) or through remote_write.
Storage Backends
| Tool |
Type |
Maintainer |
| Thanos |
Sidecar + object storage |
Community |
| Grafana Mimir |
Scalable TSDB |
Grafana Labs |
| VictoriaMetrics |
High-performance TSDB |
VictoriaMetrics |
| M3 |
Distributed TSDB |
Uber |
Visualization
| Tool |
Purpose |
| Grafana |
Primary dashboard platform |
| Perses |
CNCF dashboard project |
| Console templates |
Built-in Prometheus UI |
Alerting
| Tool |
Purpose |
| Alertmanager |
Native Prometheus alerting |
| Grafana Alerting |
Unified alerting in Grafana |
| PagerDuty |
Incident management |
| Opsgenie |
Alert routing |
Exporters
The Prometheus community maintains 100+ exporters:
| Category |
Exporters |
| Infrastructure |
node_exporter, windows_exporter, SNMP |
| Databases |
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch |
| Messaging |
Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS |
| Web |
HAProxy, Nginx, Apache, Traefik |
| Cloud |
CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Azure Monitor |
| Containers |
cAdvisor, kube-state-metrics |
Forums & Chat
| Platform |
Link |
| CNCF Slack |
#prometheus and #grafana channels |
| GitHub Discussions |
github.com/prometheus/prometheus |
| Stack Overflow |
Tag: prometheus, grafana |
| Reddit |
r/PrometheusMonitoring |
Conferences
| Event |
Focus |
| PromCon |
Annual Prometheus conference |
| GrafanaCon |
Annual Grafana conference |
| KubeCon |
CNCF conference (observability track) |
| Monitorama |
Monitoring-focused conference |
Contributing
Start contributing:
- Fix documentation: Easiest entry point
- Report bugs: File issues on GitHub
- Write exporters: Build exporters for tools you use
- Share dashboards: Publish on grafana.com/dashboards
- Answer questions: Help on Slack and Stack Overflow
Quick Reference
| Resource |
Where |
| Prometheus GitHub |
github.com/prometheus |
| Grafana GitHub |
github.com/grafana |
| CNCF Slack |
slack.cncf.io |
| Prometheus Docs |
prometheus.io |
| Grafana Dashboards |
grafana.com/dashboards |
| OpenTelemetry |
opentelemetry.io |
🎉 Congratulations! You’ve completed the Prometheus & Grafana tutorial. You now have the knowledge to monitor any infrastructure, from a single server to a multi-cluster Kubernetes platform. Go build something great!
