cortexproject/cortex

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5856 stars · 875 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant long-term storage backend for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It runs as a cluster that ingests metrics from many Prometheus servers, stores them durably in object storage (S3, GCS, Azure, Swift), and serves fast, parallelized PromQL queries with a global view of the data.

Use cases

• store Prometheus metrics long-term beyond local retention
• run a multi-tenant metrics backend for many teams or Prometheus servers
• query Prometheus time series with a global view across sources
• scale metrics ingestion and PromQL queries horizontally
• back up metrics to S3, GCS, or Azure for capacity planning
• replace Thanos or VictoriaMetrics for clustered metrics storage

When to choose

• you need highly available, horizontally scalable long-term metrics storage
• you must isolate metrics and queries for multiple tenants in one cluster
• you want a global PromQL view over many Prometheus sources
• you run on Kubernetes and want a CNCF-backed metrics backend

When to avoid

• you only need a single-node Prometheus with modest retention
• you want a simpler setup with minimal operational overhead
• you primarily need logs or traces rather than metrics
• you prefer a turnkey solution like Grafana Mimir or managed services

Facets

service · maturity stable

monitoring database caching api-framework monitoring cloud-computing self-hosted microservices go cloud self-hosted prometheus metrics time-series long-term-storage multi-tenant opentelemetry promql cncf horizontal-scaling devops docker kubernetes linux

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