DEVOPSdigest

Grafana Labs announced the release of Grafana Metrics Enterprise, a modern Prometheus-as-a-Service solution designed for the scale, architecture, and security needs of enterprises as they expand their observability initiatives.

Grafana Metrics Enterprise offers large companies an easier, cost-effective way to run Prometheus at scale.

Prometheus, a monitoring system for the cloud native ecosystem around Kubernetes, has exploded in popularity, but there are well-documented challenges to adopting the technology at the enterprise level. Grafana Labs already helps a wide range of customers run Prometheus at scale with reduced operational complexity through Grafana Cloud, which is powered by Cortex, the open source, horizontally scalable Prometheus implementation.

These experiences formed the foundation for the Grafana Metrics Enterprise offering. Grafana Metrics Enterprise is also built on Cortex, which was recently promoted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubator — a signal that the project has reached a healthy level of maturity and adoption. Grafana Labs heavily invests in the Cortex project; five of the eight maintainers, including the project’s co-creator, are employed by Grafana Labs.

With Grafana Metrics Enterprise, large companies can benefit from:

- Scalability and lower cost. World-leading efficiency, scalability, and performance allow enterprises to cost-effectively store all their application and infrastructure metrics in one centralized cluster, or across multiple Grafana Metrics Enterprise clusters. Best-in-class query performance means users can drive real-time dashboards and insights for their whole organization.

- An architecture built for enterprises. Prometheus’s pull-based architecture can be hard to adopt in enterprise environments, and is often incompatible with their network topology and firewall rules. Grafana Metrics Enterprise brings the benefits of Prometheus (flexible, multidimensional data model; powerful and concise PromQL queries; sophisticated SRE-class alerting) to enterprises in a way that is more sympathetic to their architectural requirements. The centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated architecture is familiar to enterprises. And there are minimal dependencies: Organizations only need to provide S3-compatible storage.

- Security. Grafana Metrics Enterprise adds the security features enterprises need to adopt Prometheus at scale: Native multi-tenancy, built-in authentication, data-access policies, and cluster federation allow administrators to control where their metrics live and who gets to use them. Data can be kept wherever it currently lives — whether in the EU or China or elsewhere — and users can still query a global view of their metrics.

- Ease of use. Grafana Metrics Enterprise includes an API-driven management UI embedded in Grafana Enterprise. There’s also a streamlined UI for managing centralized Prometheus alerts, so there’s no need to manually edit and manage configuration files. Grafana Metrics Enterprise subscriptions include support to help organizations implement Prometheus and Grafana Metrics Enterprise.

- A composable solution. With Grafana Metrics Enterprise, enterprises can unify Graphite and Prometheus monitoring as part of a modern, composable observability solution. Metrics can also be shipped into data lakes or other storage systems selectively to fulfill data lake requirements, thus helping organizations with migration and modernization of existing systems.

“At Grafana Labs, we’ve been assisting some of the largest enterprises in the world with their adoption of Prometheus. Through this experience we’ve learned what it takes and baked solutions to those challenges into Grafana Metrics Enterprise. If you’re looking to adopt Prometheus in a large organization, this is for you,” said Tom Wilkie, VP Product at Grafana Labs, Prometheus maintainer and Cortex co-creator.