Cortex
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage solution for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics.
Features
- Horizontally scalable: Cortex can run across multiple machines in a cluster, exceeding the throughput and storage of a single machine.
- Highly available: When run in a cluster, Cortex can replicate data between machines.
- Multi-tenant: Cortex can isolate data and queries from multiple different independent Prometheus sources in a single cluster.
- Long-term storage: Cortex supports S3, GCS, Swift and Microsoft Azure for long-term storage of metric data.
Documentation
Community and Support
If you have any questions about Cortex, you can:
- Ask a question on the Cortex Slack channel. To invite yourself to
- File an issue.
- Email [email protected].
For security issues see https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/security/policy
Engage with Our Community
We invite you to participate in the Cortex Community Calls, an exciting opportunity to connect with fellow developers and enthusiasts. These meetings are held every 4 weeks on Thursdays at 1700 UTC, providing a platform for open discussion, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
Our meeting notes are meticulously documented and can be accessed here, offering a comprehensive overview of the topics discussed and decisions made.
To ensure you never miss a meeting, we've made it easy for you to keep track:
- View the Cortex Community Call schedule in your
- Alternatively, download the .ics
Join us in shaping the future of Cortex, and let's build something amazing together!
Further reading
Talks
- Apr 2026 KubeCon talk "Discover Cortex: High Scalability Metrics in 2026" (video, slides)
- Apr 2025 KubeCon talk "Cortex: Insights, Updates and Roadmap" (video, slides)
- Apr 2025 KubeCon talk "Taming 50 Billion Time Series: Operating Global-Scale Prometheus Deployments on Kubernetes" (video, slides)
- Nov 2024 KubeCon talk "Cortex Intro: Multi-Tenant Scalable Prometheus" (video, slides)
- Mar 2024 KubeCon talk "Cortex Intro: Multi-Tenant Scalable Prometheus" (video, slides)
- Apr 2023 KubeCon talk "How to Run a Rock Solid Multi-Tenant Prometheus" (video, slides)
- Oct 2022 KubeCon talk "Current State and the Future of Cortex" (video, slides)
- Oct 2021 KubeCon talk "Cortex: Intro and Production Tips" (video, slides)
- Sep 2020 KubeCon talk "Scaling Prometheus: How We Got Some Thanos Into Cortex" (video, slides)
- Jul 2020 PromCon talk "Sharing is Caring: Leveraging Open Source to Improve Cortex & Thanos" (video, slides)
- Nov 2019 KubeCon talks "[Cortex 101: Horizontally Scalable Long Term Storage for Prometheus][kubecon-cortex-101]" ([video][kubecon-cortex-101-video], [slides][kubecon-cortex-101-slides]), "[Configuring Cortex for Max
- Nov 2019 PromCon talk "[Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity: Cortex and Thanos][promcon-two-households]" ([video][promcon-two-households-video], [slides][promcon-two-households-slides], [write up][promcon-two-households-writeup])
- May 2019 KubeCon talks; "[Cortex: Intro][kubecon-cortex-intro]" ([video][kubecon-cortex-intro-video], [slides][kubecon-cortex-intro-slides], [blog post][kubecon-cortex-intro-blog]) and "[Cortex: Deep Dive][kubecon-cortex-deepdive]" ([video][kubecon-cortex-deepdive-video], [slides][kubecon-cortex-deepdive-slides])
- Nov 2018 CloudNative London meetup talk; "Cortex: Horizontally Scalable, Highly Available Prometheus" ([slides][cloudnative-london-2018-slides])
- Aug 2018 PromCon panel; "[Prometheus Long-Term Storage Approaches][promcon-2018-panel]" ([video][promcon-2018-video])
- Dec 2018 KubeCon talk; "[Cortex: Infinitely Scalable Prometheus][kubecon-2018-talk]" ([video][kubecon-2018-video], [slides][kubecon-2018-slides])
- Aug 2017 PromCon talk; "[Cortex: Prometheus as a Service, One Year On][promcon-2017-talk]" ([video][promcon-2017-video], [slides][promcon-2017-slides], write up [part 1][promcon-2017-writeup-1], [part 2][promcon-2017-writeup-2], [part 3][promcon-2017-writeup-3])
- Jun 2017 Prometheus London meetup talk; "Cortex: open-source, horizontally-scalable, distributed Prometheus" ([video][prometheus-london-2017-video])
- Dec 2016 KubeCon talk; "Weave Cortex: Multi-tenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus as a Service" ([video][kubecon-2016-video], [slides][kubecon-2016-slides])
- Aug 2016 PromCon talk; "Project Frankenstein: Multitenant, Scale-Out Prometheus": ([video][promcon-2016-video], [slides][promcon-2016-slides])
Blog Posts
- Dec 2020 blog post "How AWS and Grafana Labs are scaling Cortex for the cloud"
- Oct 2020 blog post "How to switch Cortex from chunks to blocks storage (and why you won't look back)"
- Oct 2020 blog post "Now GA: Cortex blocks storage for running Prometheus at scale with reduced operational complexity"
- Sep 2020 blog post "A Tale of Tail Latencies"
- Aug 2020 blog post "Scaling Prometheus: How we're pushing Cortex blocks storage to its limit and beyond"
- Jul 2020 blog post "How blocks storage in Cortex reduces operational complexity for running Prometheus at massive scale"
- Mar 2020 blog post "Cortex: Zone Aware Replication"
- Mar 2020 blog post "How we're using gossip to improve Cortex and Loki availability"
- Jan 2020 blog post "The Future of Cortex: Into the Next Decade"
- Feb 2019 blog post & podcast; "[Prometheus Scalability with Bryan Boreham][prometheus-scalability]" ([podcast][prometheus-scalability-podcast])
- Feb 2019 blog post; "[How Aspen Mesh Runs Cortex in Production][aspen-mesh-2019]"
- Dec 2018 CNCF blog post; "[Cortex: a multi-tenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service][cncf-2018-blog]"
- Nov 2018 CNCF TOC Presentation; "Horizontally Scalable, Multi-tenant Prometheus" ([slides][cncf-toc-presentation])
- Sept 2018 blog post; "[What is Cortex?][what-is-cortex]"
- Jul 2018 design doc; "[Cortex Query Optimisations][cortex-query-optimisation-2018]"
- Jun 2016 design document; "Project Frankenstein: A Multi Tenant, Scale Out Prometheus"
Hosted Cortex
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP)
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is a Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor containerized applications at scale. It is a highly available, secure, and managed monitoring service for your containers. Get started here. To learn more about AMP, reference our documentation and Getting Started with AMP blog.
Emeritus Maintainers
- Peter Štibraný @pstibrany
- Marco Pracucci @pracucci
- Bryan Boreham @bboreham
- Goutham Veeramachaneni @gouthamve
- Jacob Lisi @jtlisi
- Tom Wilkie @tomwilkie
- Alvin Lin @alvinlin123
History of Cortex
The Cortex project was started by Tom Wilkie and Julius Volz (Prometheus' co-founder) in June 2016.