The Cloud Native Computing Foundation today officially graduated Prometheus from incubation, opening a new chapter in the popular open-source project’s evolution.

Prometheus is one of the most widely used systems for monitoring software container deployments. As such, the project has taken on an important role in the rise of containers, which are increasingly used to deploy applications because they’re lightweight and can easily move between different kinds of infrastructure.

Prometheus is only the second CNCF project to have graduated so far. The first was Kubernetes, the go-to framework for managing container environments. Prometheus integrates with the framework and was ranked as the most popular monitoring tool among users of the technology in a 2017 survey.

The CNCF’s decision to graduate Prometheus shows that the project has achieved a high level of maturity, a major consideration for large enterprises. Organizations need to know that any new technology they add to their environments is stable and will remain so for years to come. Consequently, the system’s new status as a graduated project comes as a boon for its continued adoption.

Prometheus already boasts a “thriving” user base, one of the factors the CNCF cited for its decision. The organization also pointed to the project’s “documented, structured governance process, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability and inclusivity.”

More than 20 active maintainers and some 4,300 contributors are taking part in the development of Prometheus. The project has gone through a total of 30 releases since it was first donated to the CNCF by SoundCloud Ltd. in 2016, which had originally created it for internal use. Other notable users include Red Hat Inc., DigitalOcean Inc. and none other than software container pioneer Docker Inc. itself.

The popularity of Prometheus stems from its expansive feature set. The system enables users to collect detailed operational data about their containers, as well as the applications inside, and create alerting rules to notify them of important changes. Beyond that, Prometheus archives historical metrics as a series of timestamped data points to facilitate analysis of recurring problems.    

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