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Cortex Intro: Multi-Tenant Scalable Prometheus

Year: 2024

Labels: prometheus, cortex, monitoring

Cortex Intro: Multi-Tenant Scalable Prometheus

Speaker(s): Ben Ye, Amazon Web Services & Friedrich Gonzalez, Adobe

Video URL: https://youtu.be/by538PPSPQ0

Summary: This talk provides an overview of Cortex which is a CNCF incubating project designed as a horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, long-term storage solution for Prometheus. The speakers describes how Cortex handles high-cardinality metrics by utilizing an API-driven architecture that separates read and write paths, and they introduce the newest features (from version 1.13).

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction to Speakers and Cortex
  • 01:45 - The Problem with Scaling Prometheus
  • 03:20 - What Cortex Does Differently
  • 04:35 - Cortex Key Features
  • 06:15 - Architecture
  • 08:15 - Working in the CNCF Ecosystem
  • 09:00 - New Features & Improvements
  • 23:00 - A Thanks to Contributors and Highlight some PRs
  • 23:20 - Demo
  • 27:45 - Outro
  • 28:30 - Q&A

Key Takeaways

  • Cortex solves the "memory-heavy" limitation of standard Prometheus by providing a central API to ingest, store, and query metrics across many instances with built-in multi-tenancy and isolation.
  • Metrics are sent via "Remote Write" to Distributors, which pass data to Ingesters. It uses a replication factor of 3 to ensure high availability; data is eventually compacted and shipped to long-term block storage like Amazon S3. Store Gateways handle the retrieval of older data from the bucket storage for long-term queries.
  • The Query Frontend and Scheduler manage incoming requests, providing result caching and splitting to speed up performance.
  • Cortex now supports OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) ingestion directly. It also supports Native Histograms.
  • Cortex vs. Thanos: While both projects share code and goals, the speakers suggest Cortex is often the better choice for platform teams needing strict multi-tenant limits and centralized management, whereas Thanos is traditionally preferred for simpler, sidecar-based federation.

Questions/Discussion Points