Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus FAQs

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a serverless monitoring service for metrics compatible with open source Prometheus, making it easier for you to securely monitor and alert on container environments. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed AWS service for monitoring containers on AWS, on premises, and in hybrid and multicloud environments; it is a cross-project solution based on the popular open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Prometheus project. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is powered by Cortex, an open-source CNCF project that adds horizontal scalability to ingest, store, query, and alert on Prometheus metrics. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus reduces the heavy lifting required to get started with monitoring applications across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Container Service, and AWS Fargate, as well as self-managed Kubernetes clusters. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus automatically scales as your monitoring needs grow. It offers highly available, multi-Availability Zone deployments, and integrates AWS security and compliance capabilities. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus offers native support for the Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) as well as the ability to ingest Prometheus metrics from over 150+ Prometheus exporters maintained by the open source community.

You should use Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus if you have adopted an open source-based monitoring strategy, have already deployed or plan to adopt Prometheus for container monitoring, and prefer a fully managed experience across AWS or multiple cloud providers where AWS provides enhanced security, scalability, and availability. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is specifically architected to handle the high cardinality (large number of arbitrary tags) in monitoring data generated by container-based applications. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus manages the operational complexity of elastically scaling the ingestion, storage, alerting and querying of metrics to meet any customer’s demand while being 100% compatible with the open source CNCF-hosted project.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus offers a secure and highly available service that eliminates the need to manually deploy, manage, and operate Prometheus components. The service also seamlessly integrates with the new Amazon Managed Grafana service to simplify data visualization, team management authentication, and authorization.

The Prometheus data model identifies each time series with a name and any number of key-value pairs called labels. Labels can be used to differentiate the characteristics of what is being measured such as “region=us-east-1”, “environment=production”, and “app=ecommerce”. Labels are similar to AWS tags applied on resources, see reference guide for more details, or Dimension applied on CloudWatch metrics.

While it is based on the open source Prometheus project, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus provides a fully managed AWS service integrated with other AWS services and is compatible with hybrid and multicloud environments. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is configured and managed from the AWS Console, API, and CLI. Authorization is controlled by IAM, policy control from AWS Organizations, and API calls are logged to AWS CloudTrail. Prometheus remote write can be configured to send metrics from your existing Prometheus server or AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry running in EKS and ECS, empowering you to easily enable your container workloads for Prometheus based monitoring. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus offers seamless integration with Amazon Managed Grafana for interactive data visualization.

Yes. To receive a history of Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus API calls made on your account, you simply turn on CloudTrail in the AWS Management Console. The following API calls to ingest and query metrics in Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus are not recorded and delivered: remote_write, query, query_range, labels, label/{name}/values, series, and metadata.

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS service that provides end-to-end observability across logs, metrics, and traces for applications running on EC2, AWS container services (EKS, ECS), Lambda, and other AWS services. Amazon CloudWatch can discover and collect Prometheus metrics, as CloudWatch metrics to provide options for our customers to query and alarm on Prometheus metrics. Amazon CloudWatch provides a comprehensive set of agents and libraries, custom and automatic dashboards, alarms, synthetic monitoring, and a service map view that enables cross correlation of logs, metrics, and traces. You should use Amazon CloudWatch if you are looking for a comprehensive observability service that brings together logs, metrics, tracing, dashboarding, and alerting in a unified experience that encompasses AWS services, EC2, containers, and serverless.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is specifically optimized for monitoring container-based workloads. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus offers a Prometheus-compatible APIs for ingesting and querying your Prometheus metrics. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a metric-only service and does not collect logs or distributed trace data. You can export selected CloudWatch metrics to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus in order to use PromQL as the common query language for querying and alarming on all your stored metrics. You should use Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus if you want a service that is fully compatible with the Prometheus open source project. You should also choose Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus if you are already running Prometheus and are looking to eliminate that ongoing operational cost while also improving security.

Grafana is an open source project for interactive data visualization used for monitoring and alerting that is commonly used with the Prometheus open source project. Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service compatible with the open source Grafana project. Amazon Managed Grafana makes it simple for engineering teams to query, visualize, and alert on data sources such as metrics, logs, and traces, no matter where they are stored.

Both services share AWS security services such as fine-grained access control and activity audit trails. Amazon Managed Grafana offers alerting capabilities, which can be used to alert on Prometheus metrics. Grafana empowers you to create dashboards and alerts from multiple sources such as Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Elasticsearch, and AWS Timestream.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is based on the popular Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Prometheus project, and is powered by Cortex, another open source CNCF project, which adds horizontal scalability to ingest, store, query, and alert on Prometheus metrics. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is committed to ongoing open source contributions and is working collaboratively with the community to improve the scale and reliability of this and other open source projects. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus also uses AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry as a collection agent for Prometheus metrics.

Our SLA guarantees a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.9% for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus within a Region.

You are eligible for a SLA credit for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus if the Region that you are operating in has a Monthly Uptime Percentage of less than 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle. For full details on all of the terms and conditions of the SLA, as well as details on how to submit a claim,  please see Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus Service Level Agreement.

Please let us know what we can add or do better by opening a feature request on the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus public roadmap.

Yes, the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector is an agentless scraper that enables customers to automatically discover and monitor their Amazon EKS applications and infrastructure by removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing Prometheus agents to collect Prometheus metrics.

If you have to deal with the overhead of managing, patching, securing, and operationalizing Prometheus collectors, then with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, you get automatic, reliable, multi-AZ, secure, and scalable discovery and monitoring for your Amazon EKS applications and infrastructure without installing any Prometheus scrapers. 

You can get started either through the AWS console or through the APIs. To use Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, specify the Amazon EKS cluster to scrape, the Prometheus-compatible scrape configuration, the subnets and security groups that should be used to connect to the cluster, and the destination Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace to send the data to. In the EKS console, you can enable the agentless collector directly from the create cluster flow.

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework. It offers vendor-agnostic or vendor-neutral APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and other tools for collecting telemetry data from cloud-native applications. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) is a downstream AWS supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project.

While ADOT provides customers with a single agent to collect across metrics and traces, customers still have to install, right-size, and manage ADOT if they wish to utilize it. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, an agentless scraper, aims to provide Amazon EKS customers a way to automatically discover and monitor Prometheus metrics for their workloads without having to self-manage any Prometheus scrapers.