Thanos is a free, open-source CNCF project that adds high availability, global querying, and long-term storage on top of Prometheus.
Thanos is an open-source project that solves two problems Prometheus alone struggles with at scale: querying metrics across many separate Prometheus servers or clusters as if they were one, and storing metrics for the long term without running out of local disk space. It is not related to any fictional character; it is a metrics infrastructure project maintained under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Originally built at Improbable in late 2017 by Fabian Reinartz and Bartek Plotka to support monitoring across many Kubernetes clusters, Thanos was open source from its first commit and was donated to the CNCF in 2019, where it reached Incubating maturity in 2020. It integrates seamlessly with existing Prometheus deployments rather than replacing them.
Thanos provides a global query view that lets teams query metrics across multiple Prometheus servers and geographic regions from a single endpoint, along with automatic deduplication of data collected from Prometheus high-availability pairs. It works with any S3-compatible object storage as well as GCS, Azure Blob Storage, and other cloud storage backends to retain metrics indefinitely at low cost.
Its component-based architecture (Sidecar, Store Gateway, Compactor, Ruler, Querier, and Receiver) lets teams adopt pieces incrementally, and it integrates with existing visualization tools like Grafana that support the Prometheus Query API, so dashboards and alerting rules continue to work unchanged.
Thanos is completely free and open source under the Apache License 2.0. There is no vendor, subscription, or licensing fee; the only costs are the infrastructure teams choose to run it on, including compute for Thanos components and object storage costs for long-term metric retention.
Thanos is used to extend Prometheus with high availability, a global query view across multiple clusters, and long-term metrics storage using object storage.
Yes, Thanos is completely free and open source under the Apache License 2.0.
Thanos was designed and built by Fabian Reinartz and Bartek Plotka at Improbable starting in November 2017.
Yes, Thanos was accepted into the CNCF sandbox in July 2019 and promoted to Incubating status in August 2020.
No, Thanos extends and works alongside existing Prometheus deployments rather than replacing them.
Thanos supports any S3-compatible storage as well as Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and OpenStack Swift.
No, Thanos the monitoring project is an unrelated open-source CNCF metrics system and has no connection to any fictional character or game.
Companies including Disney, Adobe, eBay, SoundCloud, and ByteDance have used Thanos for monitoring at scale.