Thanos
Thanos is an open-source, highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage capabilities, designed to scale Prometheus monitoring across multiple clusters. It provides a global query view, downsampling, and deduplication of metrics, enabling organizations to manage large-scale, distributed monitoring systems efficiently. By extending Prometheus, Thanos addresses limitations in data retention and cross-cluster querying.
Developers should learn and use Thanos when they need to scale Prometheus beyond a single instance, especially in Kubernetes or multi-cluster environments where long-term metric storage and global querying are required. It is ideal for organizations with large-scale monitoring needs, such as those running microservices architectures, as it provides high availability, cost-effective storage via object stores like S3, and seamless integration with existing Prometheus setups.