Company Overview
Thanos is a cloud-native open-source project that provides highly available Prometheus setups with long-term storage capabilities. Originally started in 2017 by Fabian Reinartz and Bartek Plotka while at Improbable, Thanos addresses the challenges of Prometheus high availability and data persistence at scale. Using a sidecar architecture, Thanos uploads metric data to object storage without modifying Prometheus configurations, while providing a unified query layer across multiple Prometheus instances. Thanos became a CNCF graduated project in 2021 and is used by thousands of organizations worldwide for production observability.
Key Milestones
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Project initiated by Fabian Reinartz and Bartek Plotka at Improbable to solve Prometheus HA and long-term storage |
| 2018 | Open-sourced on GitHub; released Thanos Sidecar, Thanos Store, and Thanos Query core components |
| 2019 | Added Thanos Compactor (compaction/downsampling) and Thanos Ruler; joined CNCF Sandbox |
| 2020 | Introduced Thanos Receive (Remote Write receiver); advanced to CNCF Incubating |
| 2021 | Graduated as a CNCF project; adopted by thousands of enterprises for production monitoring |
| 2023 | Released Thanos Query Frontend for improved query performance and multi-tenant support |
| 2026 | Continues active development; remains one of the most popular long-term storage solutions in the Prometheus ecosystem |
Core Products
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Thanos Sidecar | Sidecar agent deployed alongside Prometheus instances, uploading time-series data to object storage and exposing a Querier API |
| Thanos Store | Provides read access to historical data in object storage with efficient label-based and time-range retrieval |
| Thanos Compactor | Handles data compaction, downsampling, and deduplication to reduce storage costs and accelerate large-range queries |
| Thanos Ruler | Standalone rule evaluation engine supporting cross-cluster Prometheus recording and alerting rules |
| Thanos Query | Unified query layer aggregating data from multiple Prometheus instances, Sidecars, Store gateways, and other sources |
| Thanos Receive | Implements the Remote Write receiver protocol, accepting metrics from external systems such as Grafana Agent and OpenTelemetry |
Competitive Advantages
- Global Query View: Thanos Query aggregates data across multiple Prometheus instances and object storage backends, providing a unified view across clusters and data centers.
- Infinite Long-Term Storage: Leverages object storage (AWS S3, GCS, MinIO, etc.) to retain historical metrics indefinitely at very low cost, free from local disk constraints.
- High Availability Architecture: Designed with no single point of failure; every component can be horizontally scaled, and individual Prometheus instance failures do not affect historical data availability.
- Seamless Prometheus Integration: Works via sidecar mode without modifying Prometheus configuration or code, allowing smooth upgrades from existing deployments.
- Automatic Downsampling: Thanos Compactor automatically downsamples historical data, significantly improving query performance across large time ranges.
- CNCF Graduated Project: Mature governance, broad vendor support, and an active contributor ecosystem ensure long-term stability and growth.
Competitors
Key competitors in the Prometheus long-term storage and high availability space include:
| Competitor | Description |
|---|---|
| Grafana Mimir | Prometheus-compatible long-term storage from Grafana Labs with built-in horizontal sharding and multi-tenancy |
| VictoriaMetrics | High-performance metrics storage and query system with Prometheus-compatible API, capable of millions of samples/sec per node |
| Cortex | Early Prometheus long-term storage solution (now deprecated), functionality evolved into Grafana Mimir |
| InfluxDB | Time-series database usable for long-term metrics storage, though not natively Prometheus-compatible |
| Prometheus (standalone) | Native Prometheus only, suitable for small-scale or single-cluster deployments lacking global view and long-term storage |
| Splunk | Enterprise observability and log analytics platform with metrics storage capabilities for large organizations |