Cortex

Cortex is an open-source project providing long-term storage for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. Licensed under Apache License 2.0, it is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project and is designed for organizations that need to retain and analyze metrics beyond the lifetime of an individual machine. Cortex stores data durably for long-term capacity planning and brings together Prometheus time-series data, including information held in long-term storage, to provide a broader view for analytical queries.

The platform runs across multiple machines in a cluster, allowing it to scale horizontally beyond the throughput and storage capacity of a single server. This architecture also enables metrics from multiple Prometheus servers to be sent to one Cortex cluster. Cortex supports PromQL and aims to speed up queries through parallel processing and caching. The project offers documentation, release information, a blog, and community channels, including Slack, GitHub, Twitter, and issue tracking. It also provides information for users and companies running Cortex in production, supporting collaboration and adoption across its open-source community.