Cortex

Questions & Answers

What is Cortex?

Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage solution for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is designed to durably store data beyond the typical retention limits of a single Prometheus instance.

Who is Cortex for?

Cortex is suitable for organizations that require a scalable and robust solution for storing Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics over long periods. It benefits teams needing a global view of their metrics data across multiple Prometheus servers or supporting multi-tenant environments.

How does Cortex compare to other Prometheus long-term storage solutions like Thanos?

Both Cortex and Thanos provide long-term storage for Prometheus metrics. Cortex particularly emphasizes multi-tenancy, making it well-suited for service providers or large organizations requiring segregated metric data. It also focuses on aggressive parallelization and caching to optimize PromQL query performance.

When should Cortex be used?

Cortex should be implemented when native Prometheus retention is insufficient and long-term historical data is needed for capacity planning or extended analysis. It is also beneficial when a unified global view of metrics from numerous Prometheus instances is desired, or when multi-tenancy is a key requirement for metrics storage.

What technical advantages does Cortex offer for data querying?

Cortex makes PromQL queries significantly faster through aggressive parallelization and caching mechanisms. It also provides a global view of all Prometheus time series data, including that in long-term storage, which greatly enhances its analytical capabilities across distributed environments.