The Prometheus project has released version 3.0, the first major version bump in over 8 years, bringing fundamental improvements to the monitoring ecosystem.
Native Histograms
Native histograms replace the traditional bucket-based histograms with exponential histograms that provide:
- Better accuracy ā Accurate percentile calculations without pre-configured bucket boundaries
- Lower storage ā 10x less storage for histogram data
- Fewer time series ā One series per histogram instead of one per bucket
- Dynamic resolution ā Automatically adapts precision based on observed values
UTF-8 Metric Names
Prometheus 3.0 supports UTF-8 characters in metric names, enabling direct ingestion of OpenTelemetry metrics with dots and other characters without translation.
Other Improvements
- New React UI ā Completely rebuilt web interface with better query builder and visualization
- OTLP Native Support ā Native OpenTelemetry Protocol ingestion without exporters
- Remote Write 2.0 ā More efficient wire format with compression improvements
Migration from Prometheus 2.x is straightforward ā existing data and configurations are compatible with minimal changes.
