What is Cortex?
Cortex is an open-source, horizontally scalable, and highly available multi-tenant long-term storage solution designed for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It enables durable data storage beyond the lifetime of individual machines, supporting long-term capacity planning and analytical use cases. The platform runs across multiple machines in a cluster, allowing users to aggregate metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into a single Cortex cluster for enhanced throughput and storage capabilities.
Cortex accelerates PromQL queries through aggressive parallelization and caching, delivering high-performance querying. It provides a global view of Prometheus time series data, integrating data from long-term storage to expand the analytical utility of PromQL. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project, Cortex is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is supported by a community of users and companies in production environments.
Features
- Long term storage: Durably store data for longer than the lifetime of any single machine, and use this data for long term capacity planning.
- Blazin’ fast PromQL: Makes PromQL queries blazin' fast through aggressive parallelization and caching.
- A global view of data: Gives a global view of Prometheus time series data that includes data in long-term storage, greatly expanding the usefulness of PromQL for analytical purposes.
- Horizontally scalable: Runs across multiple machines in a cluster, exceeding the throughput and storage of a single machine, enabling users to send metrics from multiple Prometheus servers to a single Cortex cluster.
Use Cases
- Long-term storage and capacity planning for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics
- Accelerating PromQL queries for faster data analysis
- Aggregating metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into a centralized cluster
- Providing a global view of time series data for analytical purposes
