Grafana Labs, the leading contributor to Cortex, has announced that Cortex v1.0 is generally available for production use. Cortex, an open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, is said to be a scalable, durable, and fast Prometheus-compatible monitoring system.

Prometheus was the second project to be accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation—after Kubernetes. As Tom Wilkie, VP Product at Grafana Labs and Cortex author, puts it, “Cortex has really hit the mainstream this past year helping enterprises adopt Prometheus, and leading the charge to deliver a scalable solution with blazing fast Prometheus metrics.”

• • Cortex was started by Tom Wilkie and Julius Volz in June 2016 and joined the CNCF Sandbox in September 2018.
  • Grafana Labs offers hosted Prometheus powered by Cortex as part of Grafana Cloud, its fully managed logging and metrics platform, as well as Enterprise Support subscriptions for organizations running Cortex on premise.
  • Cortex has been used in production at select locations for more than three years, including at Grafana Labs.

Now it is ready for wider enterprise adoption: Cortex v1.0 offers production documentation, turn-key Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts, and an easy-to-use “single process” mode.