Modern cloud-native systems are highly dynamic and distributed, which makes it difficult to monitor cloud infrastructure using traditional tools designed for static environments. This has motivated the development and widespread adoption of dedicated observability platforms.

Prometheus is an open-source observability tool designed for cloud-native environments. Its strong integration with Kubernetes and pull-based data collection model have driven its popularization in DevOps. However, a common challenge with Prometheus is that it struggles with large data volumes and has limited cost-optimization capabilities. This raises the question of how best to handle Prometheus deployments at large scale.

Eric Schabell works in DevRel at Chronosphere where he’s the Director of Community and Developer. He is also a CNCF Ambassador. Eric joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about metrics collection, time series data, managing Prometheus at scale, tradeoffs between self-hosted vs. managed observability, and more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Chronosphere.